


Tabula Rasa

by juuheizou



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Autistic Suzuya Juuzou, Blood and Gore, Canon Disabled Character, Canon Trans Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Established Relationship, Fix-It, Gen, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Ishida can get away with his nonsense, Mutsuki is Still a Good Guy AU, Psychological Torture, Revenge, So I can get away with mine, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-02-27 22:57:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 31,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13258359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juuheizou/pseuds/juuheizou
Summary: Mutsuki woke up gasping for air. Drowning would have been merciful. In truth, he wasn’t drowning in the bloodbath he’d drawn but dissolving in it. Fear was like a fire, and guilt was a strong acid. It gnawed away at his insides, blackened his heart until it was gangrenous and numb. It destroyed everything it touched, as if the world he’d built himself, who he was, what he’d achieved, where he’d failed, was but a wet sponge and his memory was a plastic drum of corrosive shame and self-hatred. //AU where Mutsuki is not a homicidal villain who has been doing bad things in secret this whole time, but a Cochlea escapee from his past is the only one who can say that with any certainty after Rushima, and he has to confront his personal demons if he stands a chance at winning her vengeful game.





	1. Ashes to Ashes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, no one who shares my values is still into TG:Re, but here I am anyway! I got sick of reading after Chapter 100 or so of the manga, so this is probably gonna be a mess, but I don't care anymore. This is going to update erratically bc school and executive dysfunction, but I have the plot written out on a spreadsheet, so it's gonna happen.

A metallic smell was the first thing Mutsuki noticed when reality came back to him. He hadn’t even opened his eyes when he noticed the way his clothes clung to his body. Regaining consciousness, he felt something in his hand. As his cognitive abilities came back to him, he realized that he was holding a forearm. His concept of forward, backward, sideways was foggy, so he couldn’t say which way he threw it, but revulsion took over and he flung it away from himself. 

Pushing up onto his feet, he realized that he was back in the cave. He couldn’t see or hear Torso. Maybe he was out to get something horrible to use on him, or maybe his absence was a trap and he was waiting for him to try to run. A chill ran up Mutsuki’s spine at the thought of what Torso was going to do when he saw him up. When that thought crossed his mind, he slowed down and realized he was up. That meant he wasn’t dead, but even more, it meant he had legs to stand on and arms to push up on. His limbs had regenerated.

That train of thought was short-lived, as he soon came face to face with the object of his fear. He jumped back the moment he saw Torso’s lanky frame from the corner of his eye. Slowly, dreading what was going to happen, he turned around to face his captor. Only it wasn’t Torso lying in wait behind him, but a bleeding cadaver, dismembered and decapitated, propped up on what had been his seat. Had he not been starved in order to delay his limbs regenerating and to keep him too weak to fight, he would have thrown up at the sight of it. 

His visceral shock gave way to a terrible thought: no one else knew about the cave. He was the only one other than Torso at any point since he was captured. The logical next step of that thought was too much to handle. At that point, his physical deprivation was irrelevant. With nothing to pass, Mutsuki dropped to his hands and knees and began dry-heaving, choking on small amounts of stomach acid, enough to burn in his throat, but not enough to come up, until his exhausted body could no longer keep tensing itself over and over.

_No, no, no, no, no, no_ , he screamed internally, trembling in horror. _Please don’t tell me I did this!_ he pleaded, only for reason to cut him down. _Then who did?_

He couldn’t remember how he got there or what had happened between being taken to the field and regaining consciousness in the cave. However, he was certain that the abomination in the seat was his fault. He had killed Torso. No one else could have. For some reason, he’d thought that it would have brought a sense of relief, but it only brought the urge to take himself next. 

Everything shut down as his deduction sank in. His ears rang with multiple voices: his own voice, crying out questions. He would never do such horrible things; how did he? Why did he? What was wrong with him? The furious voices of Torso and Dad, rattling his skull with their verbal assaults even when they were only in his mind. Men always got angrier in death.

It was no secret that he thought about it, killing Torso. From the minute he woke up to Torso standing above him with his limbs in his arms, more and more as the things he did to him grew more unspeakable, he thought about it. That being said, even when he could think of a way to somehow fight back without arms or legs, he didn’t think about cutting his body to pieces and displaying the remains. Survival was always the root of his violent thoughts; he would have never even thought about staying in the cave for another moment once he was able to run. He would have never seen himself doing something so grisly if his handiwork wasn’t all but staring at him. 

Perhaps it was the reality of killing Torso, the tangible body in front of him, the sight of blood on his hands, but whatever it was, it made something fall into place. He’d cut Torso to pieces, just like his family, like that poor cat at the academy. He was disgusting.

Remembering was like metabolizing a strong anesthetic. Without any defense from the excruciating pain for which he had been put under to begin with, he regained awareness of everything, highly concentrated to make up for how long he didn’t feel it. Dissociative amnesia was agony to come down from. It felt like he was once again falling into the asphyxiating darkness of his nightmares, except already awake, there was no way to escape it.

His world felt as if it had collapsed into a black hole with the air density of a bathtub and the pressure of the deep sea, as if he was being strangled. He had hands on him all over again, trying to choke the last breath out of him. He smelled the field, almost like he was back there. Mixed with blood, the sweet smell made him feel sick again. His mind went numb, everything dissolving into a blank white haze. 

Unable to think, unable to breathe, Mutsuki dropped to the ground. He began to cry hysterically, but being too dehydrated for physical tears, it came out as convulsive laughter. He cried until he grew too exhausted from lack of food, water, and sleep to continue. At that point, he went catatonic, lying as still and flaccid as a dead man, staring blankly at the cave wall as he’d gotten so used to doing when he didn’t want to think or feel anymore. His limbs felt heavy and his body was shaking, albeit feebly. He felt as if he was falling asleep, but he didn’t remember closing his eyes, just shifting intervals of lucidity and obscurity.

For how long he was in that motionless state, he didn’t know, as his perception of time had crumbled when he was held in the cave, but he was eventually roused by another thought that made his blood run cold. He needed to do something about his malnutrition if he was going to make it two steps outside, let alone get back to Tokyo, and there was only one thing to eat within arm’s reach. His eyes turned to the discarded forearm a couple of feet away. One part of him couldn’t stand even thinking about it, but the other concluded that it was better than killing again. Steeling his nerves, he dragged himself to the forearm and tried not to think about it as he grabbed it again and took a bite. Torso’s blood dripping down the corner of his mouth made him feel sick to his stomach, but he made himself hold down every nauseating piece until it was reduced to bone. 

As much as he hated how he had done it, eating something helped. He was able to think again. Torso had kept his belongings just out of his reach when he was his captive, intentionally or not, and only then did it occur to him to find them. They lay in a heap on the ground, dirty but intact. He changed back into his own clothes and picked up his knives. In order to survive, he had to get out of the cave and find his way from Rushima back to the mainland. To stand a chance at doing that, he needed to find someone else before another ghoul found him. 

He still felt faint and lightheaded, but he dismissed it as psychological rather than physical. Regardless of the cause, it was incapacitating. His muscles were stiff, probably another side effect of the conditions he had been kept in, and he couldn’t stop hyperventilating. Given his condition, he was easy prey until he readjusted, and he had no way of knowing how long that would take. If he ended up in another tight situation, he wouldn’t get out of it alive.

When Mutsuki found Associate Special Class Mado, she took a second to recognize him. He couldn’t be pale with his skin tone, but his skin was washed out and grey. His lips and fingernails had gone slightly bluish in color. He’d lost at least 10 pounds, judging by the sharp angles of his face. Had he not spoken to her, she might not have realized the person in front of her was him at all, though he even spoke differently, his words coming out with a slur. 

Most unusual, however, was his newfound cruel streak. Mado could hardly believe she was looking at the same person as her model subordinate, the one she always warned that his kindness would kill him, attacked Takizawa so savagely that her need to make him stop trumped her lifetime of strict adherence to Ghoul Countermeasures Law. Had he not flayed skin from her body, leaving wounds the way an airhead ties strings around their fingers as reminders, it wouldn’t have made a difference. She would never forget the inhumanity she saw. Even if that only made one of them.

Everything after seeing Torso’s remains in the cave was empty space. Next thing he remembered, Mutsuki was himself again, returning to the mainland with all the other Rushima Landing survivors. His vertigo had gone away; as had the nausea. His breathing and heartbeat were normal again. He no longer felt half-asleep. It was as if nothing had happened, but he knew better. 

On the boat home, he made the mistake of closing his eyes. As soon as he fell asleep, he could feel the splinters in the wooden handle of the axe with which he killed his family, the momentum building as he brought it up over his head and gravity brought it down. He could hear the sickening _thwack!_ of the blade splitting a human skull. A gush of blood poured down his victim’s forehead, obscuring their face as the axe plunged deeper into its mark. His arms and chest tensed as he struggled to wrench it, trapped in between pieces of bone, back out. The sudden loss of resistance when he freed it, like a taut cord finally snapping, sent him stumbling backward. 

He hit the floor and the axe became a knife. It was dull and rusty, nothing special, just something he’d found. A light-colored cat, one of many strays that ventured onto the Second Academy campus, lost interest in the damp grass and began to watch him. With a knife in his hand and a victim at arm’s reach, his mind went to the scary place, the one filled with violent impulses and immoral thoughts that made him afraid of himself. Maybe if he humored one, the intrusive thoughts would go away. He could smell the wet fur and spilled entrails as he cut, sawing through layers of skin and fat with the old knife. Taking a life did nothing to silence the thoughts, but it did leave him with a pile of remains to dispose of.

When his teacher, Mr. Tokage approached him, he offered him a sharper blade with which to dispose of it. He took the knife, albeit hesitantly, knowing he would take hours with his own. When he looked back at the cat however, it had disappeared, Torso’s body in its place. Tokage’s knife was no longer in his hand, having been replaced with one of his own quinques. In the blink of an eye, he’d buried it to the handle in Torso’s neck, rending his flesh asunder until his head fell onto the cave floor. Blood spilled from the open cavity, pooling onto the rock. It dyed his hands a deep red as it dripped between his fingers. So much blood. He was drowning in it. Drowning in the blood he’d shed until--

Mutsuki woke up gasping for air. Drowning would have been merciful. In truth, he wasn’t drowning in the bloodbath he’d drawn but dissolving in it. Fear was like a fire, and guilt was a strong acid. It gnawed away at his insides, blackened his heart until it was gangrenous and numb. It destroyed everything it touched, as if the world he’d built himself, who he was, what he’d achieved, where he’d failed, was but a wet sponge and his memory was a plastic drum of corrosive shame and self-hatred. Everything was falling apart around him, and he was in the center of the destruction.


	2. Boxed In

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At last, Chapter 2!! I meant it when I warned abt erratic updates. This chapter is alternately titled: What Made Me Think I Could Write from an Allistic POV? bc oh boy. Naming feelings? Wording thoughts? Theory of mind? I'm trying to portray Mutsu's POV accurately but there is a reason most of my (obv not posted yet) writing is more Suzuya-centered.

Dead leaves and packed snow broke under his feet. The cold winter air numbed his face and hands, made his chest hurt as if he had broken glass in his lungs when he breathed. No one was behind him and he didn’t know where he was going, but he couldn’t stop running. Why was he running? 

_You’re not going to make it. You’re not going to make it,_ a voice echoed in his mind. It wasn’t a voice he knew, nor was it his own in thought. He didn’t know what he was not going to make it to or who ‘they’ were, but he needed to get there before they did. 

Branches scratched at his hands and caught on his sleeves as he ran deeper into the wooded area. The trees cast shadows in every direction, making things look like they were moving when they weren’t. A dark figure materialized nearby and he ran towards it. _Too late,_ said the same voice as before. His vision blurred and the figure vanished. _Too late._

Mutsuki thrashed himself awake, his breathing quick and shallow, as if he truly had been running. 

“Tooru…?” Suzuya asked with a yawn. Mutsuki jumped at the sound of another voice in the bedroom, having thought he was alone. 

“Juuzou…” he breathed. “When did you get home?” He didn’t remember seeing him at all last night. 

“Not sure. I didn’t really look at the clock!” said Suzuya. “Late!” he giggled. Mutsuki figured he must have fallen asleep, waiting for him.

“I’m sorry I woke you up,” 

“Eh, the sun’s coming up, anyway!” An extreme light sleeper, easily woken up and impossible to put back down once awake, Suzuya had accepted his fate the minute he realized he was aware of Mutsuki tossing and turning next to him. He was wide awake, not going back to sleep anytime soon, so he gave Mutsuki a short kiss ‘good morning’ and pushed himself up to a seated position. 

His seal-in liner wasn’t on the messy plastic storage tower he called a nightstand. Getting through a debriefing late at night, medication no longer in his system, had depleted his spoons and made his executive dysfunction even worse than normal, so he figured he put it somewhere last night and immediately forgot about it. After a brief roll of his eyes, Suzuya grabbed his elbow crutches from their place against the wall and hopped out of bed to go look for it. Even he couldn’t lose a piece of rubber the size of his thigh. Not for good, anyway.

Suzuya was searching the main room of the apartment when Patches came out of his hiding place under the couch. He didn’t notice the calico cat padding up to him, but he felt him nuzzle up to his attached leg. Suzuya grinned and reached down, leaning on one crutch and extracting himself from the other, to pet him. 

“Hi there, little guy! Did you miss me?” he asked as he scratched the top of Patches' head. Their reunion was short-lived, as Patches scampered into the kitchenette once he had Suzuya’s attention. He waited, watching Suzuya hop over to him, by his empty bowl. “Oh, you need some food!” Suzuya exclaimed. Patches followed him to the counter, knowing his people kept the bag of cat food in the cabinet underneath. However, food would have to wait. Lying on the countertop, Suzuya found another distraction. 

“Juuzou, you forgot your…” Mutsuki walked into the main room, holding Suzuya’s liner. He had found it halfway under the bed when he was picking up some clothes on the floor. However, he trailed off as he saw that Suzuya was holding something, too. 

“Anything happen, last night, Tooru?” he asked, innocently. In his hand was a knife, not a quinque, but a kitchen knife, bloodstained along the edge. 

_What did you do?! What did you do?! What did you do?! Who did you hurt?! Who did you kill?!_ Mutsuki heard his own voice, like a tree branch snapping as he stepped on it, crackling with anger. He had no memory of touching the knife, let alone of what he did with it, but he knew it had to have been terrible. Were it not, he would have remembered. 

In the overlapping white noise of questions, one resonated in his thoughts, cold and sharp as steel. Not like a knife, but like an icepick through both eyes and both ears. He heard it as if it was really the scorn of another person, close enough that they would touch, were it not all in his head. _You know what you are. What did you expect to happen?_

It was a question he had no answer to. No answer that didn’t sound like that of a naive little boy. He knew better than to be naive. He knew how selfish, how childish it was to cling to what he had when it belonged to a person who didn’t exist. He knew what he was doing was bad for him and wrong to do to anyone else, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk. When all was said and done, he was afraid, terrified of everything falling to pieces at his fingertips. A part of him thought that if he kept it to himself, put it into a box and hid that box in the back of his mind, he might be able to keep the pieces together. 

He wanted to bury it, to hide all that threatened what order he managed to keep in that box, never to be seen by the light of day. Another part of him wanted, so badly it made his chest ache, to be honest, to tell Suzuya everything then and there. What happened on Rushima, what happened to his family, what he truly was, and how much it all scared him. He knew telling the truth was what a good man would do, and he wanted desperately to be a good man.

But as he looked once again at Suzuya, he couldn’t help but think about his smile going flat, knowing he would never greet him with a shred of joy again, about his eyes narrowing with contempt, contempt for him. He looked at Suzuya and saw everything he had to lose, everything trying to do good would cost him. No one could forgive what he did. No one could stay with a person like him. He would leave. At the very least, he would leave. 

“I hurt myself, by accident,” He doubted it, but it made enough sense. A sliced hand, even a finger or two would have regenerated overnight, leaving no trace of injury. Not that he wouldn’t have made up a less plausible lie, were the need to arise. He felt sick to his stomach as Suzuya’s eyes went from the knife, to him, and back to the knife. Only a momentary silence, to him it felt like years.

“Okay!” Suzuya finally said, breaking the tension like a hammer to a window. “But next time playing with knives late at night seems like a good idea, take it from me, it never is!” he giggled. As easy and nonchalantly as he had picked it up and asked about it, Suzuya dropped the knife into the sink, dropping the conversation along with it. 

Even if he did see any reason to question Mutsuki, the minutes they had to talk about it were nowhere near enough time to do so. They had a case, and it was a bad one. At least it had been a bad one when it first opened.

With only a moderate RC count and no special physical traits, their mark was technically an A-Rank ghoul, but her body count was that of an SS. Perhaps this was because she was the one SS-Rank ghouls went to when they needed something taken care of. Her real name was Ishida Azusa, though the CCG mainly knew her as Witch, owing both to her wide-brimmed black hat and birdlike plague doctor mask, and to her practically supernatural ability to make people disappear. 

A doctor at St. Luke’s International Hospital in Chuo, she used her position and access to prey on the weak. Old people who needed canes to walk, children too sick to get out of bed, patients recovering from surgery and unable to fight, those at her mercy in the hospital became her victims once she discharged them. She took personal information from their medical charts and kept tabs on them, watching and waiting for the ideal moment to pay a visit and slaughter anyone in the house. When she was particularly hungry or impatient, she used drugs from the hospital to move things along. Crime Scene Investigation had found valium in bottles of sake, a mix of hyoscine and morphine in insulin shots, and once, general anesthesia in a nebulizer, when analyzing some of her victims’ homes. 

However, that was only her day job. Torturing and murdering for Aogiri Tree, among other branches of organized crime, was her true calling. What made her an adept hunter made her a dangerous hitwoman. With her intelligence and medical training, she knew the limits of the body and the mind. She knew how to manipulate every variable with surgical precision, how to draw out people’s suffering as long or end it as quickly as she wanted. When her job was done, she knew how to never leave a trace. Human marks, she ate when she was done with them, but the CCG still had no idea what she did with the bones and teeth, let alone how she disposed of the many ghouls she’d been hired to kill. She didn’t have the RC count to be a cannibal, but the only remains ever found were the phone calls and emails arranging their demise. 

She was apprehended nine years ago. Providing a much-needed break for the investigators who had seen her vanish and her case go cold for years, another ghoul, or maybe even a human with a strong upper body or a heavy weapon, had gotten to her before they did. Her photo couldn’t be released to the news because of the deep cut in her head, nearly split all the way open, blood all over her face and sticking to her hairline, too gruesome to broadcast to the public. The wound made her incapacitated, too weak to run away or fight, as she had made her victims when she was a predator. Having been taken alive, she was incarcerated, locked away in Cochlea for almost ten years.

Then a rogue Sasaki Haise went around the facility opening up cells, including hers. Among many other high-profile ghouls, she escaped in the Raid on Cochlea. By Washuu’s orders, her recapture was assigned to the Suzuya Squad upon their return from Rushima.

Mutsuki went over her old file after their briefing, again and again, every word, every photo. That icy, placid aspect, as if even her prison mugshot and hospital ID were watching him for the smallest sign of weakness. It brought out a panic as natural as that which took hold of him under the predatory male gaze. Why that was, he tried to find out as he kept reading, but there was nothing in a file he had never read, on a ghoul he had never met, that would tell him anything so personal. Knowing that, her old photograph might as well have been a crime scene photo from his own family annihilation, the way it knocked the air out of him. 

_Perfect. You healed nicely._ She had a voice like steel. Her cold eyes made his blood freeze over. How did she get here? What happened to Mado? Where was backup? As he faced the dark figures, it became apparent to him; backup might never come. He had to do something. He had to try. He had to--

A tap on his shoulder made Mutsuki recoil harder than he meant to, his knees almost hitting the desk. Wherever his mind had gone, the sudden touch pulled him away from it. He hadn’t even been asleep, never so much as taking his eyes off the file, but his eyes were wide and his breath was as quick as it had been that morning, as if he had woken up from another bad dream. 

“You okay, Tooru?” Suzuya asked, tilting his head in questioning. Hanbee was making a lunch run, and he wanted to know what Mutsuki wanted to eat. That was all. By no means was he trying to scare him. 

Mutsuki nodded. He talked to Suzuya for a minute, told him anything Hanbee brought him was okay, and watched him leave. Once he was alone, again, he went back to the Witch file. He avoided the photos, this time, pushing any troubling thoughts into the box in the back of his mind, where they belonged.


	3. Familiar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And I thought I took forever to finish Chapter 2. I promise I did not forget or abandon this fic, and I am so excited to get it all written! Like a nice commenter said, life happens, and lemme just tell you, life sure happened. Hope this new chapter is worth the wait!! I will never be able to update it weekly or anything because my autistic and ADHD self just doesn't have the capacity to do that, but now that I'm done with senior exhibitions and credit recovery, another months-long gap b/w updates is a lot less probable!! Thanks for the patience!!

Red as the police lights still outside the house, blood poured from her neck, soaking through the living room carpet. Her clouded eyes looked wide and pleading up at Mutsuki. He could all but hear the little girl on the floor asking him what took them so long, why they hadn’t gotten there in time to save her. _Too late. Too late._

His hands started to shake, his heart pounding in his chest as he examined the body. Assuming she had died from a slashed throat, her killer must have moved her into the cowering fetal position she was lying in postmortem. Her hands wrapped around her head; her knees had been pulled up to her chest. Though she had been posed, it looked so natural, so--

_Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. I’ll be good. Don’t hurt me._ He backed away. Frost over the ground nipped at his bare feet, but he didn’t even realize he was outside until his back pressed against the firewood pile. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. _Please, don’t hurt me!--_

“Yo, Tooru.” Mutsuki jumped at the sound. His hands came over his face on their own, like a makeshift shield against a blow that never landed. The only thing that hit him was the attention he realized his reaction was starting to draw to him. He lowered his hands, clasping them behind his back to hide the shaking, and tried to meet Suzuya’s eyes like nothing had happened. “Body snatchers are here,” said Suzuya. Beside him, Mutsuki noticed the transport team: two people, one holding a body bag folded under their arm. Both looked at him, expectant. 

“Oh,” said Mutsuki. “Yeah. Go ahead,” he murmured as he stepped back, moving over so they could take the girl’s body to the medical examiner. He followed them with his eyes and made a deliberate effort to think about them, noting their clothes, their movements. In his state, no distraction was too small, or unwelcome. Even watching body transport do their thing helped. It kept him from retreating back into his head, at least.

“Hey, Tooru,” said Suzuya as the transport team filed back out. “You okay? You kinda looked like I was gonna lunge at you, a second ago!”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine,” Mutsuki pulled his face into the most convincing smile he could manage. “Never better.” Each lie he told to Suzuya made the gnawing inside him that much hungrier, but the gnawing paled in comparison to even considering the alternative. “Um, I should finish looking over the living room,” he said, desperate to flee the conversation before Suzuya had the chance to cross-examine him. 

“Wait, Tooru,” said Suzuya. “Mikage’s headed over to the M.E. in a little bit. He wouldn’t mind pairing up, if you need to take a walk!” Mutsuki paused for a moment in consideration. 

He did end up going with Mikage. Something about knowing Suzuya was onto him, at least enough to give him an opening to leave the house, made it feel like even the walls had eyes and they were all on him, picking apart every move he made, trying to catch him at the most subtle inconsistency. If he couldn’t fool Suzuya into thinking nothing was wrong, he could at least fool him into thinking a trip to the morgue had fixed it. 

“Cause of death was asphyxiation,” explained the medical examiner as she guided them from the small lobby to the steel dressing table where the girl’s body lay under a sheet. “From the slashed throat. The blood obstructed her airway and she drowned in it,” she continued, pulling the sheet down to the girl’s waist. 

“How long has she been dead, would you say?” asked Mikage.

“Time of death was about six o'clock this morning.” The squad had arrived less than half an hour later. That explained why blood was still running down her neck when they found her. It also told them that Ishida managed to slaughter a four-person household, stage the scene, and get away before her last victim’s blood dried. She was still damned efficient, but she was taking risks, leaving herself a small window to get in and get out. 

“Any defensive wounds?” 

“Not a scratch on her apart from the throat. Nothing under her fingernails or caught in her teeth, either.” Strange. There was little a grown human man could do to fight off a ghoul like Ishida, let alone a primary school-age child, but most would at least try out of fear.

“I see. Anything else peculiar about the body?”

“Yeah, actually. No defensive wounds, like I said, but I did find what looked like a pinprick, like you get from a needle, on her arm, so I ran a full tox screen on her to be safe. She tested positive for hyoscine, of all things.” 

“Uh, sorry, what is hyoscine, exactly?” Mutsuki forced himself to ask. Ishida had medical knowledge and applied it to her hunting techniques, including at least one documented use of hyoscine in particular, according to her old file. He remembered the name, but that didn’t mean he knew what it was. More importantly, he needed to at least _sound_ engaged and all-there. In that respect, there was nothing less convincing than silence.

“It’s used for motion sickness and post-op nausea, but concentrated enough, it can also be used as a date-rape drug,” said the medical examiner. “It puts a user in a disoriented state, if not complete unconsciousness, in high doses.” That had to have been how Ishida managed to do so much damage in such a minimal window. No time wasted grappling a victim who could fight back. The family would have been helpless. 

Helpless. Vulnerable. Compliant. Like he had been. On Rushima. In the cave. Unable to get away from Torso’s cruel, hungry eyes. From his hands. He could feel them crawling up his body again at something as little as a word he could vaguely associate with them.

Without a conscious thought, his eyes fixed on the wall behind the medical examiner’s head. It was even the same shade of grey as the cave wall he would stare at until Torso was done with him. Slipping into that numb and colorless haze came so easy now, the transition so seamless he didn’t even notice that he had stopped hearing the medical examiner’s voice.

“Um, I assume she was given a high dose, then,” said Mikage, to redirect the medical examiner’s attention to him rather than his frozen partner.

“You assume right,” she said. So Ishida had access to at least some underworld resources. “It was administered intravenously, as you can see from the bruising on her arm, around the injection site, so the effects would have hit her hard and fast. 20 minutes, tops.” 

“Do you think this was done by someone with medical training?” he asked. It didn’t look like it. At least not to him. He was no doctor, but the deep purple bruises on the girl’s upper arm flared a few centimeters from the puncture wound left by the needle. Said wound looked so misshapen and gouged open that he didn’t even need the medical examiner’s guidance to notice it. Needles were needles, so it was by no means a big open lesion, but he would find a new primary if he came out of an appointment with an arm like that.

“Hardly. Needles aren’t supposed to leave major bruises. Your killer mulched the surrounding blood vessels, digging around, presumably for the radial vein.” The medical examiner traced a gloved thumb along the bruises. “If you ask me, I wouldn’t even give them an M.A. certification.” 

“I see,” said Mikage. “Thank you. We’ll be in touch.” He handed her Suzuya’s card, so that she could send over the full autopsy report when she finished it, and shook her hand. Mutsuki didn’t do the same, still staring vacantly at the wall as the medical examiner left them. “Rank I Mutsuki,” Mikage tried. No response. “Rank I Mutsuki,” he repeated a little louder. 

“Sorry, did you say something?” said Mutsuki with a slight hitch in his voice, nothing like back at the house, but startled.

“We’re going, now. Back to Shibuya.” Mutsuki’s eyes went wide for a moment, his mouth forming a silent ‘oh’, like it had just then clicked that their meeting with the medical examiner was over. 

“Hey, Mikage,” he later murmured on the way back to the field office, sitting next to him in the passenger’s seat of the van. Mikage nodded to let him know he was listening, quiet again now that he didn’t -need- to talk. “Um, I know we haven’t worked together all that long, and, uh, I know I’m in no place to ask for favors but… um… could you…?” he tried, wringing his hands in his lap, unable to look up at Mikage’s calm and unreadable face. “Do you think you could not tell Juuzou that I froze up at the morgue?”

With four scenes and nine bodies on their hands, it wouldn’t have mattered if Mikage said yes or not; Suzuya didn’t have the divided attention to ask. Pieces of both the old and new files lay scattered all over the conference room table where the squad had been working, and the whiteboard was plastered with maps, photographs, and crudely half-erased notes scrawled wherever they would fit. He zipped from one side of the board to another and back again, glued to it like nothing else existed.

The conference room always started to look like that when their squad leader was trying to see a pattern. He had yet to find the missing link in whatever pattern was running through his head, but he did have something running through his head, judging by the fact that he was too busy darting around the room to notice or acknowledge Mikage and Mutsuki when they returned. He went right past them to grab a document from the table before he finally stopped in his tracks and realized he wasn’t alone. 

“Hey! There you guys are!” he then exclaimed, turning around to face them. “Got anything good for me?” 

Mikage nodded and proceeded to explain the highlights from their visit with the medical examiner. Suzuya came to the same conclusions he had. The last three scenes, all meticulously staged and all done in a narrow window of time, suggested that her years in Cochlea hadn’t dulled her skills or cut off all her resources, but might have slashed her risk aversion. 

“One thing was weird, though,” said Mikage. He told Suzuya about the bruising on the girl’s arm, how the medical examiner doubted someone even close to Ishida’s level of training had administered the drug. “You don’t think we missed something in the previous scenes, do you? Maybe she’s not as sharp as we thought?”

“Mm, we should go back and get the tox screens from the other three display bodies, for sure!” said Suzuya. “But let’s not say she’s rusty just yet!” After all, one amateur mistake didn’t erase the professionalism and organization it took to put every other part of every scene together. 

No two kills in one ward, always done in less than an hour whether it was one victim or four, in and out of shady apartments and hospital wings alike without raising an alarm, the strict pattern of killing as many victims as were in the vicinity but only leaving one body to be found, and pulling them all off with only a day or two between them. None of that said ‘out of practice’. It took someone who still had death down to a science.

Suzuya went back to the board, where he zeroed in on a map of Tokyo he had taped to the upper left-hand corner and marked with stickers. From the red dot in Shibuya to another in Shinjuku, he traced his finger in a short line, more like a dash. Impale a young man living alone in Shibuya, then a couple days later, take a short trip up to Shinjuku to eviscerate a first-year resident at the university hospital. He ran through it in his head. Simple enough. 

From Shinjuku, however, Suzuya drew the imaginary line over to the brutal flaying to death of three junior college students in Edogawa, all the way across the city. By no means was such mobility impossible for a professional killer, or even a regular killer with the motivation, but it entailed a great deal of exposure for one knowingly being hunted at the time. Exposure a veteran criminal such as Ishida knew better than to gamble with. Edogawa was where the movie in his head started to fall apart a little. No one just flipped a switch and turned from a killing machine to a novice, or the other way around, unless--

“Of fucking course,” Suzuya muttered. “We’d better go over the autopsy report from Edogawa again, and see if there’s anything a little outta place!” he said, still pointing a finger to the board. 

Time wasn’t going to unravel a ghoul who picked up and managed a clean kill after years without practice, nor would time explain the new risks she was taking, but it should have pared down her resources. Underworld connections were more fair-weather than fair-weather friends; as a universal rule, even an asset like Ishida was dead to the crime world the moment they got caught. Suzuya knew that much, seeing as he happened to have grown up in a similar position to the explanation he had in mind. 

Mama was no hitman, but she knew an awful lot about throwaway people, and she knew how to make hers do her bidding every time she tossed them in the pit to fight for her. Recreational predators like Mama had contacts. Suzuya could only imagine the arsenal of pawns an Aogiri-affiliated contract killer might have at her disposal. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Witch had found herself a black cat, albeit not one as experienced as she was with needles. She wasn’t working alone.


	4. Echo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next on Mutsuki Tooru Deserves a Break but Jude Has Other Plans: my fastest update since I started this fic! Also in case anyone's paying attention to it and noticed that it's different again, I keep changing the total chapters because every time I zoom in on my overall plot and outline individual chapters to get an idea of how many its gonna be, I start actually writing it and it feels like I'm trying to put too much of it into 2,000 or so words. It'll be finished at whatever chapter the ending ends up at, I guess.

Ishida was sending a message to someone. At least that was the consensus at the impromptu meeting Suzuya called to talk strategy following the investigation of a fifth scene that fit her pattern. The timetable said ‘on a mission’ and the presentation that went into each kill made a statement, regardless of whether or not they knew what that exact statement was.

Nakarai suggested that perhaps she wanted her old contacts to know she was still an asset. After nine years behind bars, her business would have tanked. Not only did that diminish the possibility that the kills were contracted hits, but it meant she would have to reestablish herself now that she was free.

“Why else would you stage such an elaborate scene?” he asked them, all seated in a circle at the conference room table. Her showmanship escalated with every kill, going from running a single twenty-some through in Shibuya to razing a small chapel and taking the time to handcuff the pastor’s still-rattling corpse to a pew in Chiyoda. Their whiteboard read like her blood-soaked resume, a tribute to her intelligence and attention to detail. 

He couldn’t find any other reason why she would leave her old hospital I.D. on a lanyard around Victim Number 2’s neck. It told anyone who saw the body that Ishida Azusa was her killer. That I.D. was the reason they picked up her pattern and could link the other scenes to her. She would still be a nameless serial killer, perhaps not even known to be a ghoul yet, had she not left it there. There had to be someone worth putting herself on the line to let them know she was back. 

Abara agreed but disagreed. The message part made sense. However, maybe said message wasn’t that she was still valuable, but that she was still a threat. Hitmen didn’t take the time to leave messages unless they were paid to, the exception being to leave a warning. Every Academy graduate knew that.

The burgundy cross-hatching deep in Victim Number 3’s back still stared at them, taped to the whiteboard, raw skin and sliced muscle hanging from gashes that penetrated fat and grazed bone. True, it demonstrated the ability to get in and out -or get someone else in and out- of a residence hall where anyone who really belonged on campus carried identification, not to mention the skill it took to escape with two grown humans’ worth of remains on her. However, it didn’t take such brutality to tell someone she was good at her job. To Abara, it said ‘look what I could do to you’ more than ‘look what I could do for you’. 

“The question is who she has it out for.” Contract killers made enemies among their business connections. An escapee from Cochlea could have a vendetta against the investigators who caught her. Or maybe the CCG stopped her from finishing a job or collecting a debt and she had loose ends to tie up. They had no shortage of potential targets. “We should revisit the evidence from her old case and look deeper into hits taken out close to her capture.”

“Yeah, about that,” said Suzuya, leaning back in his seat and twirling a pen. “We have jack shit on those.” Bones, teeth, bodies, to that day none had ever been recovered from a single hit. It wasn’t like they could go through her phone records and match each target to a cadaver to see which ones might still be on her list when, in hard forensic terms, they couldn’t even confirm most of them were actually dead. “But you’ve got a point!” Nakarai and Abara looked from Suzuya to each other, unsure who he was talking to. “Let’s step away from the murder board and do some digging into her background!” Though not just her professional one. “Her personal life oughta be a good start!” 

They knew that Ishida knew how to kill and leave no trace. Suzuya had accepted by the time CSI was done with the chapel that they were not going to find her by picking apart the evidence. She knew better than to let them. Her accomplice, unofficially nicknamed Black Cat to pare down the syllable count, had, on the other hand, proven themselves less than professional in Koto and Edogawa. 

Upon further examination, as suggested by Suzuya, valium had been slipped into plastic cups of what had been punch found in the junior college students’ dorm room, each one with the exact same amount despite an almost 100-kilo size difference between one victim and the other two. More likely than not, Black Cat just followed Ishida’s orders, all their skills coming from doing what they were told. They probably did not know how to evade capture on their own any better than they knew pharmacology and would be easier to catch than Ishida herself, and if they caught them, they could use them to catch her. 

Even though by the end of the meeting, the squad agreed to his proposed shift in priorities, Suzuya took it upon himself to go through the personal stuff when they retrieved the cardboard box with her name on it to search. Family documents, bank statements, anything pertaining to how she passed the time between saving lives and ending them, he told the squad to hand over. They brought their piles of paper to different parts of the room and he arranged his in a choppy semicircle on the floor around him.

Going off what he knew from Mama, he was looking for a family member or close friend, someone Ishida had a great deal of influence over as a person. People could be made to do things under duress, but for the scenes to be constructed with such care that the squad didn’t even think to look for another person until the fourth one, the person constructing them must have really wanted to do right by her. That desire to please couldn’t be taught. It came from the kind of long-term manipulation that not only instilled compliance but emotional dependence, the kind that warped the victim’s entire love map somewhere down the line.

“Hey guys!” said Mizurou an hour or so in, still rifling through his folder of decade-old phone bills as he spoke. “I just thought of something. There was a party at the junior college on the night the victims were killed.” That was where they got the laced drinks, having taken them back to the dorm as the party was beginning to die down and they still hadn’t finished them. “It’s 2017. Everybody knows not to take drinks from shady strangers at a party, so how did Black Cat get them to take the drinks they dosed?” After a brief silence, Mizurou put down the folder to look around the room. Of the three squad members actually looking at him, two stared at him with a look between confusion and ‘go on’, and he remembered that he had the most active social life out of all of them. “Okay, Hanbee!” He pointed to Abara with the folder still in his hand. “Would you take a drink from some random guy who just came up and handed it to you?” 

“No, but I don’t see how that-”

“Exactly! But say you hit it off with some dude and they seem cool. You start talking, and you hang out with them all night, and at some point he goes ‘don’t worry about it, man, I can grab us another round’ or something. Nothing out of the ordinary, right?”

“We get it, you’re cool enough to go to parties!” said Nakarai with a roll of his eyes. “Get to the point, already.”

“Yeesh, okay, okay! Anyway, what if Black Cat did something like that? Passed themselves off as a fellow partygoer and got friendly with the victims during the night? Then if they went to get punch for the group, it would just seem like they were taking one for the team and pushing through the crowd so their buddies wouldn’t have to.”

“So we’re looking for someone with social skills,” said Suzuya. Close to Ishida and good with people. He liked seeing their search parameters narrow down, even a little. “Good job, Mizurou!”

“Yeah, but not just that. Doing and saying the right thing goes a long way, but even the best actor would stick out at a college party if they were like, 60 or something. They’d have to look the part as well as they act it, if they wanted to blend in,” Mizurou explained. “I think Black Cat is an undergrad, or at least close enough to pass for that age group.”

“No shit!” Suzuya exclaimed, bringing the heel of his hand to his forehead, eyes wide. “I’d give you a gold star if we weren’t grown-ass adults!” He hopped up from his spot on the floor and left the room without missing a beat or stopping to explain.

“Um, Suzuya sir?” Abara tried to ask before the heavy conference room door closed behind Suzuya, who was already onto the next train of thought, too one-track to even acknowledge him.

When Suzuya returned, he had a stack of fresh papers in his hand, hot off the downstairs printer. He told Hanbee and Mikage to roll out another board where he could put them up. As he taped the papers to the new board, the squad realized that they were all printed-out photo I.D.s belonging to a small gallery of young adults. 

After a quick apology for just giving the numbers for each of Ishida’s old phones to an analyst and letting them take care of the rest digitally, thus rendering their hour or so of leafing through the paper copies more or less unnecessary effort, he explained who the owners of the I.D. cards were. Each one was older than 16 and younger than 30, and each one had contacted or been contacted by Ishida Azusa more than once in the years before her capture. The new board was their suspect list, lined along the left-hand side in one full column and one fragmented, with six potential Black Cats. 

“Okay, Nakarai and Mizurou, you guys drive back to the junior college and canvass the res halls!” Suzuya handed them copies of the six photos. “Mikage, you’re gonna head over to Shinjuku and check out the CCTV footage at the hospital.” Now that they knew they weren’t looking for Ishida herself, those tapes needed to be looked over again, for any one of the six they were now looking for. “Hanbee, you and me can-” 

Before he could finish distributing tasks and suspect packets, his phone rang in his pocket and derailed his attention. Swearing under his breath, he dug it up and answered. The squad couldn’t hear the other line, left to guess what was up by the roll of their leader’s eyes, his monotone ‘uh-huh’ every few beats, and the slow nod of his head before he hung up. Suzuya didn’t have to tell them it was the Metro police again. Before the squad could start retracing their steps, the regular cops had a fresh homicide for them to check out, at least to see if it was done by their ghoul. 

The afternoon call took them to Sumida. Abara drove a van to small two-bedroom house, down a suburban road where every individual residence had its own branch of it leading to the driveway, a long and winding drive away from anything. Only a single cop car and two officers received them, the scene having been processed by everyone but them by the time they got there. The more senior officer pulled Suzuya aside to fill him in, boss-to-boss, while her underling went ahead and showed the rest of the squad into the living room, where Nakarai split the squad up, each to examine a room.

Mutsuki got the bathroom. The hardwood floors were plastered with dried and almost-dried blood, giving him a trail to follow down the hall leading up to it. Under the cracked door, he saw the light on, and more blood leaking over the threshold. His hands began to tremble on the doorknob, the younger cop having told them there was one body on scene, the blood telling him he had drawn the short straw and been sent to the room it was left in.

_Keep it together. Unless you want another Koto to happen. Is that what you want?_ he told himself as he balled his shaking free hand into a fist and stepped over the thick blood spatter pooling where the tile floor met the wood trim. _That’s what I thought._

One foot in front of the other, he stepped into the room. He tried to tune out the soft ripping-velcro sound of his shoe parting from the floor each time, sticky with too much blood to avoid. Broken-up streaks of white tile led to the shower, a modern walk-in with a glass door that had been left ajar, as if to say ‘look over here’. 

As he passed the towel rack, a weight, like a full-grown man sitting curled up on his sternum, settled in his chest. It felt like the cave again, Torso’s mutilated corpse glaring at him from the periphery, turning to face it like someone who knew they were about to lose at Russian roulette. Dread racked his bones and twisted his insides as if to tell him he was pulling the trigger with a bullet in the chamber. When he turned the corner of the false wall, he lost his tight fists and went slack, like the losing man shot dead at the end of the round. 

He dropped his field kit, the minor _crash!_ sounding more like an echo to him, bouncing from the walls and everywhere but the floor as it hit the bloodstained tile. Tweezers, scalpels, tape, tubes, jars, and pens escaped the plastic case with a cacophony of clatters, too loud and too soft at the same time. Plastic bags flew around his feet like leaves in the wind, and somewhere the impulse to pick them up poked halfheartedly at him, but he couldn’t tear his wide eyes away from what he saw in the shower.


	5. Hush

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is either great or nonsense and I have no idea, but I've proofread it more times than I've proofread all four previous chapters combined, so that's not likely to change. Not sure what else to say about this chapter other than I'm sorry, especially to those more affected by emotional anguish than blood and gore. Blood and gore people, I will be sorry in a few more chapters. (Maybe that's why this chapter is so weird to me? Like I experience alexithymia and have super low empathy so it's hard for me to write/otherwise portray emotional stuff? Per-freaking-haps friends.)

Their victims were a husband and wife discovered by a visiting family friend earlier that day. The husband was pronounced dead on scene, his dismembered body left in the bathroom. Nothing on the wife yet, but judging by the volume of blood on the floor and the family friend having told police that their reason for visiting was that she never showed up to her weekly lunch with them, it was safe to assume she was killed alongside her husband. According to Officer Takeda, body transport would get the husband’s torso and limbs over to forensic pathology to find out more specifics as soon as the squad packed up and left. 

After his short briefing with Officer Takeda, Suzuya made rounds throughout the house to figure out where he should go. When he found him, Nakarai filled him in on where everybody was and what places he hadn’t sent anyone to look at. The house had a few more rooms than the squad had people, giving him a few to choose from.

Suzuya had just set his field kit on the counter in the kitchen when he heard something go _crash!_ No one else acknowledged the crashing sound or asked about it, nor did anyone own up or apologize for making it, so it fell upon him as the one with hypersensitive ears to investigate. Before he even got to look around, he abandoned the kitchen to check out the noise.

He followed it to the bathroom, where Officer Takeda said the body was, and where Nakarai said he sent Mutsuki. Just connecting those dots drew a bad picture in Suzuya’s head. Even he had a hard time being surprised when he opened the door and walked in on Mutsuki, frozen and trembling in the hands, plastic bags and small tools strewn all over the blood-soaked floor around him.

“Tooru?” he called in a hushed voice, his best imitation of the one Mutsuki used when _he_ was shutting down and staring vacantly at the floor or something, as he approached him. Mutsuki said nothing, did nothing, not the first few times Suzuya said his name. He just stood there like a statue, looking wide-eyed at the torso before him as if he had never seen blood before.

“Juuzou!” he exclaimed after a minute, sound and movement being the first things to catch his attention when he could register his surroundings again and Suzuya making both. “What are you doing here?” When did he get there? How much did he see? One uncontrollable punch in the gut from fear turned into another as Mutsuki let himself think about it. 

“Heard a noise,” probably the field kit hitting the floor. 

“Oh, uh, yeah, I, um, I dropped my field kit.” said Mutsuki, able to hear himself talking too fast and internally berating himself for it. “I’ll, uh, go ahead and pick that up!” 

“Lemme help,” said Suzuya. He crouched back down toward the floor and started picking up the plastic evidence bags. “Can I?” he looked up at Mutsuki and asked. Mutsuki paused, not even sure why he wanted to say ‘no’, but he couldn’t make his mouth move, so he just sank to his knees in a small clean spot and began to clean up his mess and Suzuya stayed to do the same. 

“Thanks,” he managed to tell Suzuya after they finished repacking the black plastic case. “Sorry about that. I’ll only be another minute. I promise.” 

“How about a trade? You can take the kitchen and I can finish up here!” 

“You really don’t have to do that. I-”

“I said, you can take the kitchen, Rank I Mutsuki.” Suzuya crossed his arms and looked him dead in the eye, unsmiling. Bile started to rise in Mutsuki’s throat as he realized Suzuya was serious. The only other time Suzuya pulled the superior card and wasn’t kidding, it was to get him to fall back, having sustained a wound that was bleeding faster than he could regenerate. Life and death. How could he argue with the Suzuya reserved for life and death?

He picked up his field kit and turned to leave in silence, unable to make his mouthparts form the words, even if he could think of something else to say. As he made his way to the door, he almost walked right into Suzuya. An apology for being so absentminded died in his throat, so he just kept his eyes to his own shoes and headed to the kitchen, as he was told to do. 

As transparent as it made him feel to have someone else pick up on it, Mutsuki couldn’t help but feel a little bit of the weight in his chest evaporate as he cracked the door behind him. Like he had put the man’s torso behind a wall in his own mind, along with the memories he would have sworn it crawled out of, had it arms and legs to crawl with. There were things he could still put behind a wall. Something was still where it belonged. He still had some order. At least for a minute.

He was only halfway down the hall when Suzuya’s rare authoritative voice started replaying in his head. Against his conscious will, his mind started to pick apart every beat, every drop in inflection, even parts he knew were just how Suzuya talked. As soon as he set his kit back down, his hands began to shake again. 

That time, he shoved them into his coat pockets. With every intention to grab a handful of the lining fabric, like a bit for his quivering fingers to chew on, one hand found something small and soft in what was supposed to be an empty pocket. His first reaction was to run his thumb over the thing, able to understand, for a moment, why Suzuya carried those fleecy animal keychains from the zoo around everywhere. Then it occurred to him that Suzuya carried those fleecy animal keychains from the zoo around everywhere. 

Mutsuki remembered getting Suzuya the exact one he took out of his pocket. For a second, he saw the two of them back in the blue and teal gift shop at the aquarium, Suzuya running the plush octopus over his cheek when he thought no one was looking. He would have smiled at the memory of stealthily bringing it to the counter and surprising him with it on their way out, were he not so fixated on why Suzuya had just returned the favor. 

Suzuya used touch, like petting something soft or running fingertips over his stitches, not only for enjoyment but to calm himself down. When in distress, his tactile stims brought him back from the edge, past the point of just taking a few deep breaths and leaving the stressor alone. Maybe he thought Mutsuki was at the edge and was trying to help him the way he helped himself.

Before Rushima, Mutsuki would have just asked if his guess was right. It used to be so easy to just ask. That evening, however, the most Mutsuki gave Suzuya was a small nod and an ‘mm-hm’ whenever he said something on the way home. True, he wanted the answer, but it was better to live without it than face the imminent consequences of looking for it. If he asked Suzuya if he thought something was wrong with him, then it could go one of two ways. Either he thought so and now had another clue, or he didn’t think so but Mutsuki’s asking gave him a reason to consider it. Neither ending was one that Mutsuki even wanted to think about. 

He made dinner in silence, ignoring repeated pleas from Suzuya to let him be his assistant like he always was, and served it the same way. With Suzuya staring at him from the other side of the counter, he managed a few bites of what he made before getting up and scraping the rest of his plate into a tupperware. Truth be told, Suzuya might not have been staring at him, but the awareness of his eyes on him -however they were on him- was too much.

Suzuya seemed to give up and adapt to the quiet by the time he finished his own plate. Instead of asking Mutsuki if he wanted to play a game or do something together, he got right to his solitary nighttime routine. The only peep he made was humming to himself as he retreated down the short not-even-hallway to the bedroom, and even that was quieter than his lack of volume control usually allowed. 

Mutsuki waited for him to grab himself a pair of pyjamas to slip into their room. As soon as he heard the bathroom door shut, he took the octopus and laid it on the bed. While Suzuya took a shower, Mutsuki rehearsed his revised ‘I’m fine’ speech, pacing around the room as he did so. 

The faucet creaked as Suzuya turned off the water. Mutsuki froze at the sound, as if hiding from some invisible predator that would eat him alive unless he could pass for a part of the furniture. Despite knowing what to say down to the filler words, his script went blurry in his head the second Suzuya stepped into the room. His freeze and flight responses fought it out, using every synapse of every nerve he had as a battlefield. 

Mutsuki could see that Suzuya’s hair was still damp, water dripping down his back and leaving a triangular wet spot in his grey sweatshirt. Flight took that information and told him to copy him. He could take a handful of clothes and at least run the water with the door closed for a while. It would make a simple excuse to get away that would not raise any questions. He wanted to go ahead and do that. Really, he did, but he couldn’t get his legs to walk toward the door. Flight possessed his conscious thoughts but freeze had taken over his motor nerves and he just stood there by the foot of the bed, anything he wanted to do and anywhere he wanted to go rendered nothing but a withering action potential that lived and died in his head.

“-- but you found it!” Mutsuki realized, having grown too absorbed in screaming at himself to move, that Suzuya said something. No matter how hard he racked his brain to deduce it, he had no idea when he even started talking, nor could he put together clues to figure it out. 

“Um, yeah,” said Mutsuki, in desperate hope that it was an acceptable response, or at least vague enough to be made acceptable.

“You know, you can keep him with you, if you want! I can share!” Suzuya crutched over and picked up the octopus from the bed. He handed it back over to Mutsuki, or more, he reached towards him with the hand it was in. The expectant grin across his face said ‘take it!’ but Mutsuki just shook his head. 

“Oh, it’s fine. You can have it back. Thanks, though.” He gave Suzuya the best pretend smile he could pull together and pushed the octopus back to him. “That was sweet of you, but I’m good. Promise.”

“Nah, keep him on you!” said Suzuya. “If Witch keeps accelerating like this, we might be checking out another dead guy tomorrow, so you might need him! You’ve been spacing out a lot!” Suzuya smiled as he said it, but it made every organ in Mutsuki’s body drop down a region. 

He tried to keep in mind that Suzuya was just being blunt, as he had been since they met. He used to find comfort in it, no mind games, no fear he was hiding something. He tried to find comfort in it again, but all he could see was yellow tape where comfort used to be, ‘CONFRONTATION’ emblazoned across it in bold black lettering.

Mutsuki went still, staring at Suzuya with a face he tried so hard to keep straight that his teeth felt as if they were about to crack. He asked himself how bold he was going to be, how obvious and fragile a lie he would tell this time. There was but one way to find out whether or not he had burned off the last drops of shame left in him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, forcing himself to meet Suzuya’s too-curious gaze and balling his hands into fists in his pockets, as tight as he could without breaking his own fingers, to keep from wringing them. 

“You don’t have to tell me every gory detail.” said Suzuya. Just something other than those avoidant half-answers or straight-up lies that threw him into that mean cycle of ‘Oh, okay!’ ‘That makes sense!’ ‘Wait a second…’ ‘No it doesn’t.’ ‘Hey, Tooru?’ Something to make him a little less confused. “Just something.” 

“I’m fine. Stop asking,” 

“Nope. I’m not gonna stop ‘’til you give me some kinda answer.” He had tried long enough, not asking questions, trusting Mutsuki to tell him what was up. It felt like he was feeling around a pitch-dark room with oven mitts on, not being able to take what Mutsuki said at face value, but he knew he was feeling for something. As long as he was feeling for something, he was not about to stop.

“I did!” Mutsuki heard his voice rise to a shout. For a second, it made him cringe inside, not having stopped and thought to himself, ‘time to snap’ but hearing it happen anyway. Another second, however, and he didn’t care. Panic razed every rational thought in his mind, every potential consequence, every inkling that Suzuya had done nothing to deserve it. “What part of ‘nothing’ do you not understand?!”

Hands tore from pockets, pointed at Suzuya in accusation, ran through his own hair in frustration. Screaming made his head feel light and his ears ring. Suzuya’s voice, quieter and more monotone when upset, seemed to shrink and shrink until it disintegrated altogether, until all Mutsuki could hear was his own acerbic screaming. 

He couldn’t even pick out words from it once it picked up momentum, like he was standing still and silent behind a barrier, watching a ghost that looked like him and talked like him argue in a language he had only just started a course in, but he knew he was still screaming. The barrier snowed over and cleared up, sometimes only a light frost over it, sometimes nothing but opaque white, in and out on an timetable not even he understood. At its peak, he couldn’t even hear his own voice, only feel the lightness in his head that meant he hadn’t stopped.

The last discernible sound was the _click!_ of Suzuya shutting the door, leaving the room in a few robotic steps and a mechanical turn of the knob. As hard as Mutsuki tried to fill in the gaps, all he achieved in doing so was realizing that there were gaps, substantial gaps in what he remembered of the fight that had ended only minutes ago. He couldn’t recall a defeated sigh, an apology, or a middle finger, nothing. Just that lightheaded feeling and seeing snow all around them. 

It wasn’t all a haze, not as he calmed down, alone in their bedroom. Bits and pieces, parts about not knowing how to stop being an investigator, something in the vein of ‘stop picking me apart’ like a case to be solved, Mutsuki could still hear in his head after the apartment went quiet. He knew he said those things. He knew he spat them at Suzuya in anger or panic or whatever the light feeling was.

 _Get out! Just get out!_ He remembered ‘get out’, in his voice, but not when he said it or how Suzuya responded. Maybe Suzuya didn’t respond. Sometimes he just booked it from an interaction like that, not knowing what to say, or not getting the message that he was supposed to say anything. 

Mutsuki resigned himself to remain uncertain and took a seat at the edge of the bed, the octopus staring at him from the floor, where it ultimately ended up being dropped. He had every intention to call the damage done and go to bed, but he couldn’t yet make himself lie down, so he drove the heels of his hands into the mattress and sat staring at the closed door. No matter how long he kept his eyes on the unpainted wood, featureless and hypnotic as a cave wall, he couldn’t bring himself any closer to sleep. 

It took mere seconds for the now-quiet apartment to feel too quiet, so much so that for a moment, Mutsuki swallowed all the guilt and shame holding him back and opened the door. He had to at least know if Suzuya was still there, to make sure he was okay. The idea of him impulsively going out at night and getting lost, or of melting down over something they said and hurting himself, terrified him too much to let him care what consequences he would reap for disregarding his own words. 

“Juuzou…?” he even peeped as he crept down the hall. He froze, though, before he could turn the corner. Alerted by little hums and murmurs Suzuya made as he rocked gently on the couch, distressed enough to self-soothe but not at the dangerous point, the protective fear dissipated and left Mutsuki feeling nothing but terror at the thought of Suzuya noticing him. As quiet as he could manage, he went back to the bedroom and shut the door again, praying Suzuya didn’t hear him. 

He went to bed like he had been telling himself he was going to do and tried not to think about how vast or empty the two twin mattresses felt without Suzuya there beside him, or about how much more than a big fitted sheet it would take to close the distance between the two of them, distance he made and had no idea whether he wanted there or not. Coming down so hard from the lightheaded surrealism that made it so easy to fight, the overpowering weight of realizing what he had done, like gravity doubling back on him, should have drained him enough that he could sleep, but all it did was wring out tears. Silent, don’t-notice-me-crying, don’t-look-at-me tears, but tears. Not even he knew who or what he cried for, too many viable explanations -old and new- that he was too out of touch to narrow down, but he didn’t know what else to do about a single one.


	6. An Axe to Grind

Awake but not driven to react, Suzuya lied still and zoned out through the never-changed generic text message tone. His own personal cell was different from Mutsuki’s alarm clock, and as such, it fell short of sending him the signal to get up. He ignored it, staring at the ceiling until a second message came in and it vibrated itself off the armrest, hitting him in the face. 

Still not all there, acting more on the reflexes that fired whenever something touched him without warning than genuinely thinking it was anything other than the phone, he clawed at the air for his nonexistent assailant. Tossing and turning as he kicked and scratched, he knocked his crutches from their position, leaning against the same armrest he left his phone on. The loud clatter as they hit the floor made him lunge toward the noise and he flung himself right off the couch. That got him up.

“Okay, okay. This'd better be fucking good,” he muttered as he scrambled up to his hands and knee and climbed back up onto the couch. Before he reached down for his crutches, his phone went off yet again, so he stopped to unearth it from his displaced blanket. Blinking a few times at the sudden bright light in his eyes, he hit the latest notification on the screen and opened up his messages.

 **tooru**  
Went on a walk. See you at HQ.  
Text me when you get out the door.  
Have a good morning.

Another bubble popped up to indicate that Mutsuki was typing, but after a minute, the bubble went away without a fourth message taking its place. He set his phone on the coffee table and abandoned it to go and get dressed. Not much else he could do, even if he had the foggiest clue what else, at least in theory, he would do. They never fought like last night, with raised voices and shut doors; he had no idea what the rules were. 

From the minute they met at the field office, Mutsuki kept his head down and said as little as he could to Suzuya while still doing his job. Every errand to another part of the building, every piece of either file that needed looking over, he volunteered without missing a beat. The only thing unrelated to the case he said to Suzuya was when he asked what he wanted from the diner around the block, after convincing Abara to let him take over the lunch run, just this once. 

As their in-office hours unraveled into pacing and throwing out ideas, the brain-racking phase going uninterrupted for the first time in days, the conference room felt less and less like a conference room. It began to feel more like a water torture chamber, quickly filling up to Mutsuki’s neck. By the late afternoon, the squad ran out of those solo tasks that kept him afloat and he had to feel the curious looks from Suzuya with no excuse to flee, biting the tongue that wanted so much to apologize and explain that he was afraid it would slip. He never thought he would call himself so for someone dying, but he felt almost thankful when, as the sky was just barely starting to get dark and it was almost time to punch out, Suzuya got another phone call.

Among more things than Mutsuki was ready to admit, Suzuya was right about being called to visit another homicide that day. Though grateful for any reprieve from the asphyxiating conference room, he couldn’t help but be just as much so that, after all was said and done, he gave into the impulse to take the octopus with him on his way out that morning. He ran his fingers over it in his pocket as the squad drove over to Minato, trying to think about the soft material rather than what awful thing was waiting for them at a small public library.

According to a flyer on the bulletin board they passed as they went in, the aging librarian ran a book club in the evenings, every single Friday for the past four years. Metro PD was combing through the file cabinet behind the main desk, looking for a roster or something to help them find out what happened to the other club members, but the squad had no interest in that effort. Even without the blood, more than even the biggest single person’s worth, in splattered pools tucked away throughout the building, if it was another one of Ishida’s kills, then no one in the room survived. 

The only body on scene was that of the librarian, slumped over a little round table, with her head lying in her hands, as if she had fallen asleep in her seat. Blood pooled around her, soaking the side of her face, and dripped from the table onto the green carpet. Upon not-even-close examination, its obvious source was the deep wound to her head, moist red and bleeding in a languid but heavy stream.

On the outside, the wound reached almost to the level of her eye. Up close, they could see the layers inside like an anatomical model, as she was cracked open down to the brain. The splintered bone from her skull looked as smooth as one could get outside an operating room. Only fine bone fragments and brain matter, almost like dust, thickened the blood soup sitting deep in the gash.

As body transport peeled her off the table and into a body bag, a book clung to her face, hanging by the two pages stickiest with blood. A burdensome hardcover, it fell to the floor seconds into moving her. Suzuya almost ran right into one of the transport workers, just missing them with his head, reaching down for the book before his impulse control had time to catch up. 

“See… What I… Have… Done…” he read aloud from the cover, pointing to each word with a rubber-gloved finger. “Sounds too fitting to be coincidence, huh?” Chasing a killer who, whether that someone was friend or foe, was trying to get herself seen by someone, it did to him. Besides, he seldom visited libraries, but he had been to enough to know that library books had a second barcode taped somewhere on the cover. Unless someone like him wandered in and picked the library sticker off, it was from a personal collection. Black Cat had brought it from home.

Their answer as to why, or at least a solid hypothesis, came from the medical examiner the next morning. Her analysis of the librarian’s wounds showed that the gash in her head was made by something with teeth, and likely a motor for it to have been done so clean, without big cracks in her skull or any other trauma from the blunt force it would take to get so deep with a manual tool. On their copy of the report, she took the time to jot down her best guess in a margin: buzzsaw or chainsaw. Some kind of electric saw.

“Well, a buzzsaw would be hard to carry around. I mean, we’re talking about a library in as quiet an area as Tokyo gets, so something big like that would draw attention,” said Suzuya as Abara finished reading the report to him aloud on their way up the stairs. They were the first two squad members in the field office that day, Suzuya having gotten there as soon as Abara called about needing to show him something. 

“Pardon my ignorance, but isn’t a chainsaw just as big and noticeable, Suzuya sir?” Abara asked as he unlocked the conference room door. He held it open for Suzuya and turned on the light as he followed him inside.

“They don’t have to be!” Not anymore. “I found an 20-ish centimeter one at Home Depot a while back!” Portable and easy to hide. “Anywho, what was it you wanted to show me?” Suzuya asked, already sitting cross-legged in the middle of the table.

“Right! So…” Abara took a blue folder from his cassock and set it down in front of Suzuya, standing adjacent to him over the table. As he laid out the stacks of paper, Suzuya realized it was their photos of the librarian, the old photos from Ishida’s first capture, and Ishida’s medical workup from Cochlea. “This is the victim from yesterday evening,” said Abara, pointing to the pile with the new photos. “And this is Ishida Azusa when she was captured in 2007. You see a resemblance?”

“Yeah. They both have their heads cut open. We know that already.”

“That’s not all they have in common, though.” The librarian was 57. Ishida would be 60 now. Abara spent the earliest part of his morning asking the police for their interview transcripts, and according to her surviving friends and patrons, Mrs. Umino, the librarian, was an educated woman and a respected community member. Ishida was a surgeon before she was caught, and according to the press at the time, her whole neighborhood was shocked that someone they held in such high regard was a ghoul. As he explained how much they had in common, Abara leafed through the papers until he picked one from the stack. “I think she was, at least symbolically, trying to replicate what happened to her when she orchestrated the seventh scene.” he said. “Listen to this.” 

When Ishida was captured, she was thoroughly examined by both the medic stationed at Cochlea and a forensic pathologist, in case it was another ghoul that cracked her open; it could bring an investigator one step closer to putting that other ghoul away next. However, the forensic pathologist determined that it was done by steel rather than a kagune. At that point, the whole thing was dismissed as unimportant, though awfully lucky for the most-likely-human who gave her that wound, and back then, it _was_ unimportant. The CCG kept the report but tucked it in the back of her old file, out of the way. 

What interested Abara about the report was how her wound was different from that on the librarian. According to the forensic pathologist that examined her, it was a single cut, with only one site of impact deeper down. The weapon used would have to be heavy and gather a great deal of momentum to get so deep, hitting her brain just like the saw used with the librarian, in one swing. It was a in fact a cut, as in the weapon was sharp as well.

“Not a knife,” Suzuya interrupted. “The skull is tough. Even a sharp one would be too small to do that kinda damage without, like, a lot of them.” Or a lot of stabbing and sawing. 

“Agreed. Her attacker couldn’t have used a sword either. Too light,” said Abara. He would know. “Which brings me to the book.” ‘See What I Have Done’ by Sarah Schmidt. “Do you know what this book is about, Suzuya sir?” 

“Nope.”

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it last night so I looked it up.” Abara took out his phone and read him the summary he found online. The book was about a girl named Lizzie who murdered her family with an axe. “We were wondering what could be so important about this particular book that Ishida would send it with Black Cat to a place with hundreds of books to grab off the shelves, right?” 

“Yeah?”

“What if this vendetta is against whoever attacked her nine years ago, and the weapon they attacked her with was an axe?” 

Perhaps using a saw, whatever kind it was, at the library was a matter of convenience or availability. Ishida paid more and more attention to detail with every scene, getting more and more specific to _something_. The book was another means of adding specificity. She couldn’t replicate what happened to her, but she could let people know what element was missing.

“Then we have one more person we can use to close in on her!” Suzuya grinned up at Abara and flashed him a finger gun. “You’re the best, Hanbee!” They needed to get one step ahead of her before she decided to turn her famous vanishing act on herself and drop the face of the Earth. Figuring out her endgame could put them that one step ahead. 

Suzuya could see it. As a ghoul whose M.O. revolved around preying on those she perceived as weak, Ishida was bound to underestimate at least one, in her 40 or so years of hunting. It was more than possible that some altercation between her and someone who fought back went unaccounted for. The only question was how to use that, seeing as said altercation would have gone unaccounted for. 

Though Black Cat remained their priority, Suzuya sent Abara down to the analysts’ den to at least see if any axe-related crimes in Chuo nine to ten years ago looked like they could be relevant. Chances were, an untrained and ill-equipped civilian who could attack a ghoul and more or less win might have dabbled in violence before. At best, they had another lead. At worst, they turned up nothing and moved on. It couldn’t hurt to look.


	7. Cat And Mouse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah the moment of truth, starting to find out if I did a terrible job setting up the action and stuff or not! Also the shortest chapter I have written in this fic, and a somewhat timely update for once in my life! My last couple chapters have been on the longer side and the total word count is still quite a bit over what I anticipated it being at this point though, so the shortness is okay. I'm happy with it. 
> 
> P.S. I know this fic is so fraught with cliches but I don't care. For one, it's for fun, and for another, it's fanfiction. Originality is not exactly the point.

It was an especially cold morning, too cold for fresh snow but easily cold enough to freeze over anything that was already there. Mutsuki had stopped feeling his hands and face a solid hour ago, grateful he had worn a jacket, but wishing he had the stealth to take the gloves he had absentmindedly left on the coffee table the day before. Better the cold than waking up Suzuya, but frozen hands were frozen hands.

He ran down the sidewalk, by sleeping homes and dormant shops, only slowing down to a walk when he saw ice on the ground. As he passed the Shibuya metro station, a new record for him, he looked up to see the moon still shining somewhere between a quarter and full, stars still out across a dark sky. It was still early and he still had time to kill before his meeting in Chiyoda. Thinking about the agonizing morning, packed with staring and dodged questions, he would spend with Suzuya if he came home then, he found the stamina to venture further out. 

Yonebayashi would fall over laughing at him for being such a model investigator, slipping out before the sun came up and going on a walk each morning, a run if he could will himself to pick up the pace. It made him laugh for a second, his breath forming a halfhearted white plume in front of him, to imagine her complaining as she dragged herself along by his side. His pre-dawn regimen of the past week or so would kill her. Not really, but she would insist so the whole time. 

He stayed out for two hours at the least, making it as far as he could from the apartment building until it began to get light out before retracing his steps back. He had yet to miss a day, for Suzuya had yet to stop trying to solve him every spare moment they had together, and he had yet to be able to face him. As it turned out, the secret to keeping up with a running routine was having something to run away from.

_It’s looking grim, Matsuri! I dunno if backup’s gonna make it in time!_ Suzuya’s voice started to ring in Mutsuki’s ears. _Aah!!!_ Laughter broke up his cries and echoed off the graffitied metal around them. ‘Pretend there’s a ghoul chasing you’ might have been sound advice for pushing one’s physical limits, but coming from Suzuya, Mutsuki could never figure out whether he meant it as a joke or as actual advice. Nonetheless, he didn’t have the heart to tell his new friend how brutally the uncontrollable giggling between screams and the exaggerated thrashing of his hands over his head killed any sense of urgency as they ran through an empty tunnel. 

Something cold biting at his face, clinging to his cheek like a thin layer of glue, drew Mutsuki from the replicated laughter in his memories to face how much he missed the real thing. He slowed down to a walk and brought a hand to where the clinging feeling seemed to begin. A thin layer of ice, delicate as the first frost over a leaf, melted on contact under his fingers. When he blinked, the clinging dissipated. With his bare hand, he wiped the new tears he dislodged from their hiding place in his eyelashes, before they could freeze to his skin too. He had been too lost in his own head to notice until then that his body was trying to cry.

Mutsuki looked up and sniffed, in part to keep from giving into the tears, in part because the last thing he wanted was snot frozen to his face alongside them. In the same beat, he swore to god he heard shoes hit the pavement, too distant to be his own but close enough not to be drowned out by his own breath. He would have thought nothing of the sound of pedestrians in a heavily populated city, had he looked over his shoulder and seen at least one other person behind him, but he was the only one on his strip of sidewalk at that hour.

He would have also dismissed it as his own being paranoid, hearing things that weren’t there because his mind still thought he was in danger, seeing shadows just because he was looking for them. It happened all the time. Knowing it did, he knew that unless he could think of a good reason why that morning was different, he had nothing to worry about. 

As much as he repeated that to himself, a few minutes into resuming his run, he heard more footsteps. Like the first time, they dissipated in seconds and seemed to come from nowhere, as no one else was around when he stopped and looked. Fine. He would at least acknowledge that the sound in his ears was there. Perhaps doing so would even make it stop.

Just so that he could stop witnessing his own possible murder in nauseating detail, intrusive images that flashed into his head and vanished again like the footsteps that brought them on, he turned onto a narrow pedestrian bridge. Nowhere for a real person to disappear to if, by some marginal chance, he was really not alone. In that case, he would turn around and see them, or he would know for sure that the footsteps were all in his head because he would turn around and not see anything.

Even though he knew the latter would happen, his hands hovered over his quinques as he got about halfway across the bridge. No matter what he left without each morning, he could never walk past them and not pick them up, seeing Hogi and himself ambushed on Rushima whenever he tried to. One hand was already touching the steel handle concealed under his jacket when, in the quickest and most sudden movement he could manage, he pivoted around, making the person behind him take a few steps back in surprise.

The first thing Mutsuki felt, upon seeing the stranger, was terrible. Wide-eyed and blinking, mouth hanging slightly open, hands raised a little in surrender, they looked as terrified as anyone would be if they were just minding their own business and someone pulled two knives on them out of nowhere. He wanted to sink down into the concrete and disappear at the realization that this was him now, lashing out at innocent people because he let fear tell him that otherwise, anything that moved would lash out at him first. 

“Oh god,” he said, tucking the knives back away. “I’m so sorry, I- Are you- Are you okay?” The rise and fall of the stranger’s chest slowed down and their cold breath started to form more steady little clouds, but they still looked at him with that panicked face. As if he needed to feel worse, they looked about his age, if not a little younger. “Hey, you’re safe, really. I, um-”

“It’s fine.” They shrugged, giving him a timid, still in shock but keeping it together smile. Something about that voice, though. Mutsuki could have sworn he had heard it before, but he had no idea where, nor did he trust his own mind much after this slip. He dismissed it as nothing, like he should have done before. “I guess Doves have to watch their backs. You never know if a ghoul or something is about to pop up and eat you, right?”

“Haha, something like that.” Mutsuki flashed them the most non-threatening smile he had in him. “Again, I’m so sorry. Honestly, I feel awful, and-” He paused. ‘Doves have to watch their backs,’ the stranger just said. He never told them he was an investigator; he didn’t have his badge or anything displayed on him, and it wasn’t like he was a Washuu or anyone the press cared about. They smelled human, and maybe they just knew what a quinque looked like, but what they called him, not CCG investigator, not ghoul investigator, but Dove... 

“Don’t mention it.” They assured him. “Now I have a great story to tell at parties.” Mutsuki forced a small laugh, so that they were both laughing at that.

“Hey, I have to ask. Do I know you from somewhere?” he asked them, as casual as he could manage. Casual as that was, however, the stranger only stared at him for a silent moment before taking their phone from their coat pocket. Like he wasn’t there and they hadn’t even started talking, they looked down at it, checking the screen.

“Oh no. I have to go,” they said, speaking faster and starting to walk away. “Looks like you’re not going to make it to class on time this morning, Toshio.” _You’re not going to make it._ “I knew I left the house too late.” _Too late._

“That’s fine. We’re going in the same direction.” The stranger said nothing. They just walked faster, head down, hands in their pockets. “So you’re a student?" He swore they muttered something about making it to class. "That's nice. Where are you going to school?"

“I have a train to catch.” Even if they weren’t so much shorter and choppier with him, the station was the other way. Someone who knew the public transit system, like a student, would turn around. Unless they weren’t really catching the train.

“Let me pay for your pass.” Mutsuki offered after them. He couldn’t lose them. Though still piecing together why, he knew he couldn’t lose them, silencing the place in his mind that kept asking for a more definitive reason to speed up. “It’s the least I can do, really.”

“Thanks, but I already have one. Speaking of which…” They stopped to open the sports bag they carried with them. As soon as they undid the zipper, Mutsuki realized it might not have been the stranger’s blood he smelled; the human scent from the open bag hit him like a speeding train without the thick fabric to mute it. Their bag had been used to carry bodies, and by the smell of it, a lot of them. “Of all people, I would think you knew how to let things go, Tooru.” 

Before Mutsuki could fully process what the stranger said, they turned around. Their bag fell, discarded, to the ground at their feet. He had barely noticed they were holding something when said something flew at him hard and fast.


	8. Snow Moon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today we at least begin to answer the question, "how the frick did Mutsuki even heal and stuff to begin with?" I feel like now might be a good time to admit that I LOVE writing blood and guts. And I definitely, without question, have a cruel streak. Let's just say our dear Mutsuki is going to have a very eventful day (like the next 1-2 chapters are also within this already-bad day to be Mutsuki Tooru). Idk maybe I'm being too upfront and obvious too soon with my master plan but hey, I may or may not be compensating for the complete lack of foreshadowing around the canon debacle I'm trying to fix.

Mutsuki stumbled out of the way, covering his head more like a cowering child than a ghoul investigator trained in hand-to-hand. His hands reached back to his quinques a beat too late. The dull orange box that just missed the side of his head swung back where it came from and in what felt like a split second, he was in the snow. The taste of his own blood flooded his tongue with metallic warmth, and the bridge appeared to be spinning, iridescent black spots flashing in his eyes.

As he felt, hands trembling, for his knives, the stranger lunged at him again. He dodged once more and crawled to his feet, only to find himself backed against the guard rail. His left hand got a hold on one handle and Ifraft came between him and another swinging blow. Metal ground against metal, his quinque caught between the teeth on a serrated piece attached to the heavy base. 

_Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. I’ll be good. Don’t hurt me._ Coarse firewood scratched at the back of his arms, frostbitten bare feet going numb with nowhere left to step back, his own little heart pounding in his ears. Cornered and afraid, all he could do was let out a tiny squeak from the back of his throat, tears stinging in his eyes. 

As he backed all the way into the wood pile, his fingers brushed the handle sticking up from the ground. Desperate, his hand flailed at the wrist until it wrapped around sanded wood, fine splinters breaking off under his thumb. Where minutes felt like hours curled up in the kitchen, praying with quivering hands on an invisible rosary, it grew faster and faster with each step as she closed in on him. Next thing he knew, he was tearing the axe out of the wood pile, its weight driving him down and his arms in freefall. _Please, don’t hurt me!_

The smell of fresh blood brought Mutsuki back to the bridge just as he followed through, slashing across the stranger with so much panicked momentum he nearly fell forward, right back into the snow. He slashed again without a second thought. And again. And again. And again.

At first, he didn’t even see the damage he had done, or process anything but the smell. What was a hint in the air, after a few times across, became dense and rich, as though he was breathing it through a mask. Red-brown slush going darker and darker around his shoes, the smell got stronger and stronger until he felt he couldn’t breathe anymore, like the mask was too much more sanguine-smelling vapor than oxygen to keep him alive. 

_Such a deep cut. So much blood. Didn’t know it would… never seen so much before… oh my god…_ It poured from the gash in her skull. Her silver hair and pale face hung over him like the moon in the dim light, dripping blood in a fast-flowing stream onto his nightgown, onto his clavicle, up his neck, until it was falling right onto his face. Regret drained all feeling from his body, making his limbs heavy and his head light enough to faint as he tried in vain to crawl back. 

Filed nails dug into his skin as her hand went around his throat. She caught him in a grip that let him breathe, but forced him to gasp for it. It tightened when he struggled, pinning him, helpless, to the floor. He could feel someone else’s blood leaching into his hair, sticky and still warm. When he caught a breath, it smelled like the back of the carnicería; he could taste the corpses around him just from the sepulcral air at their level. 

_Oh, I am going to kill you very slowly for that, you little--_ Sirens. Her hand went slack at the sound of sirens. Time stopped going faster or slower and just stood still, as though the world had stopped turning. Like a snowglobe no one wanted on their mantle, they were frozen, dead bodies at his hands and feet and a blood-drenched white wraith looming above him. The only thing that moved was the snow falling outside the open window. He could breathe again, but he held his breath. He was free again, but he couldn’t will his body to do anything, not even to blink. 

It wasn’t a siren screaming in his ear, but Mutsuki went still at the sound of it, nonetheless. A grinding roar echoed off the urban clutter around them, getting closer and closer until the weight over him dissipated, as if the creature pinning him down had run from the noise. He, on the other hand, took a moment, if not a few moments, too long to snap out of it and bring his knife down. Mid-slash, something pulled at his wrist, but when he tried to get the pulling force off, he couldn’t move his left hand to do so, unable to feel it at all.

With a soft _thud_ , muted by the snow, his quinque dropped to the concrete. The serrated piece came at him again and, still not having fully registered that it was either one, he moved to block it with his unfeeling and unarmed hand. His own bleeding wrist stopped mere centimeters from his eyes; the smell of his blood and the sight of his sawed-through flesh and bone all hit him at once. Then came the realization that his hand was cut about three fourths of the way off. Then the excruciating pain as he caught the tearing chain again and almost finished the job.

The stranger dealt him a kick under his ribs, feeble, almost wobbling, but enough to knock over someone who didn’t see it coming. In tunnel vision, nothing real to him but his left hand holding on by tendons and splintered cortical bone, Mutsuki did not see it coming. He made it two steps backward on his feet before falling to the concrete, coughing and choking for air. 

He could hear the stranger’s footsteps getting closer, heavy but uneven, as if they were struggling with each one. Their blood and viscera assaulted his senses without relent, soaking through his clothes as it made puddles beside him and mixed with the snow melting under him. Mutsuki tried one last desperate time to get to Abskol before they could finish him. 

His hand shook so violently he couldn’t unhook the clip, fingers doing nothing but tap erratically at the handle when they found it, only a little more under his control than the hand holding onto the rest of him by a thread. The stranger seemed to notice how hard a time he was having, confident enough to just watch, in no apparent rush to flee or kill him. As he struggled with his second knife, they simply looked him over once or twice and then disappeared from his field of vision. 

They hadn’t left him. Mutsuki could feel their hand on his lower leg, like a padded restraint in their knitwear gloves, holding it still as he tried to at least get his feet on the ground. Metal teeth pressed against his knee and the shaking got worse. Unable to even keep his hand on his knife, his fingers made a tortured vise grip around nothing as the mechanical roar started up again.

Every muscle in his body contracted in agony. Writhing made the chain, ripping clothes and skin open, shredding flesh and bone alike, hurt so much worse, but he couldn’t make himself stop. His back arched on its own, dragging his head through snow and slush and blood, but he didn’t even feel the cold or the wet in his hair. He didn’t hear his voice, but he had to have screamed, for his throat burned, raw by the time they were done with both sides. 

The stranger knelt by their bag and tucked what Mutsuki finally took the time to identify as a small chainsaw back inside it. They spared a few looks over their shoulder as they rummaged for something else, now ever more so assured that he could do nothing to surprise them. Right before they turned around to leave, they tossed whatever they had been looking for underhand at him. Mutsuki flinched as the mystery item landed near his head. 

“Eat it,” they strained, blood dribbling down the corner of their mouth. “I doubt I have to make you, this time. You have places to be.” For a second, Mutsuki looked over his shoulder to see what they were talking about: a plastic container that looked and smelled like meat with rice. When he looked back up, they had turned their back on him.

He watched them drag themselves away, clutching their midsection as they put one lagging foot in front of the other. Their gait was so slow and unsteady, but they moved further and further across the bridge nonetheless. With their grey winter coat and slick black hair, they reminded him of the dark figure vanishing into the trees in his dream, only he couldn’t chase them. Neither sawed-through limb could bear much weight without collapsing, his hand just about ready to come off if he made the wrong move. Perhaps that was why they took the time to saw into his knees, he realized as he tried and failed to get up; he would catch them if he could follow them. 

As he came down from the adrenaline high that allowed him to at least try and fail, his awareness of his wounds turned from a detached lack of controlling his own body to blinding pain. Despite the cold winter air around him and the snow beneath him, sweat clung to him as though he had just gotten indoors after sledding for hours, all the snow he had fallen into melting and leaving him soaking wet. Another delicate frozen layer stiffened the skin on his hands and face, yet he felt warm, almost feverish. Like an old friend, not seen face-to-face in so long but their name still tugging at his subconscious, nausea welcomed him with an iron grip on his stomach and turbid black crept into his peripheral vision. 

Ready as he felt to pass out, though, he never slipped all the way into unconsciousness. Perhaps it was that he was lying down, gravity allowing blood to still reach his brain despite the inhumanly slow pounding of his heart in his head, or perhaps it just took more to make his used-to-be-sensitive vagus nerve overreact like it did in the past. Whatever the reason, he could still see the moon, watching him overhead. The black gradually cleared away but the moon kept shining, white as the snow he lay in, at the end of the tunnel before his eyes. 

As he grew used to the pain, no longer too distracted by it to process anything else, he could feel his wrist and knees knitting back together. Sasaki used to compare the sensation to sutures, a needle poking and poking and then pulling the flesh shut. Yonebayashi would say it felt like an old video game looked when it cut between scenes, pixels cascading down one by one until the whole screen was covered. When he was alive, Shirazu compared it to crank bugs, ‘but like, good crank bugs, if that’s a thing’. To Mutsuki, though, it was akin to a gentle but torrential rain spreading out from each broken fragment and converging little by little until he was all in one piece.

On impulse, he tried one more time to at least push himself from his back, planting his fingers in the snow and biting his lip in an effort not to cry out as he managed to sit up. His wrist resumed gushing blood as the strain of forcing it to work reopened the still-tender new tissue where his veins were patching up their butchered ends, but at least the bone was healed, able to support him for that short, agonizing time. Trying to look away from his own exposed bone and bleeding flesh, his eyes went back up to the moon, now fading into lavender twilight. 

That first warning sign of daybreak sent a jolt of panic up his spine. Of all things, he remembered he had to be in Chiyoda at 10:00 sharp. In winter, with its long nights and short days, it had to be almost seven in the morning for dawn to be creeping up on him already. He would be heading back by then, but he couldn’t get his legs, knees being a bigger area with less of a vascular network coursing blood to them, to move without things starting to go black. Eyes darting around him, looking around for any shred of a solution, his gaze fell on the plastic container next to where his head had been. 

When he picked it up and examined it, he couldn’t smell any of the harmful-if-ingested substances he had learned to identify from the CCG or from personal experience. He did smell, just as he thought it was, meat and rice. The unseasoned, minimum-effort fare to be expected from an undergraduate automaton with only so much time to cook between lectures and homework, but meat and rice. Something to eat. 

_You need something to eat, or the internal damage is going to kill you before we can even think about your limbs._ His bruised abdomen ached. His chest stung when he tried to breathe. No matter how he tried to check out and ignore it, he could feel the thin trickle of blood between where his legs would be. Like his whole body was telling him they were right. _You’re making this much harder than it has to be._

Fresh meat, still dripping red between rubber-gloved fingers, a handful held so close he could taste it clinging to the air, made him salivate. He didn’t even realize he was reaching for it until he pulled himself right into the glassy postmortem stare, sunken eyes unceremoniously left open, of its source. Drooling from hunger became drooling from nausea as he recoiled away from both, making a futile effort to cover his mouth and nose with hands he didn’t have. 

_Please…_ he begged in a pathetic whimper. _Please don’t make me…_ Just let him die. He wasn’t afraid to anymore, even grateful that he hemorrhage to death in peace, rather than meet whatever terrible end Torso had intended for him. 

_You have until I count to ten, Tooru. Then I force it down your throat until you’ve licked his tibia clean._ With each second they counted off, their hand came closer, the smell building into such a thick, overpowering haze he almost started to forget where it came from. Would that he could have forgotten, or at least shaken those dead eyes from his thoughts, before they got to ten. _If you want it that way--_

No matter what ratio of ingredients Mutsuki brought to his mouth, every bite smelled and tasted like Torso’s severed forearm. But like a frightened child, the same one who cowered from sudden movements and lost to amateurs with chainsaws, he could go to lengths he never thought possible to hide, to bury all evidence of his hurt before he let himself be seen. Now, however, it would take more than a sweater over his school uniform to make that happen. 

Like any bodily function, regeneration burned calories, a lot more per hour than running, tolerating cold, and fighting combined. Also like any bodily function, it began to shut down when the body was running on a deficit. An extended nighttime fast was not enough to bring it to a complete stop, but breaking his would make the difference between healing enough to get home and clean up without missing his train or spending all day bleeding on the bridge. That in mind, he summoned the will to keep swallowing, fingerful after horrible fingerful.

_Well, this is a nice surprise. I didn’t even have to sedate you, this time._ He caught himself thinking in a voice within his on-testosterone range but still too low to be his own, phlegmatic and almost condescending, as he finished off the container. _Now hold on. That doesn’t mean I’m done with you._


	9. Masterpiece

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did we ever find out a reason why Hogi interrupted that one conversation at chapter 100 or so? If so I don't remember it, but obviously I have my own reason in this fic. Believe it or not, I love Mutsuki Tooru and he deserves such good things after all the nonsense Ishida (Sui not Azusa, though -minor spoiler alert- the latter would not be untrue) did to him and all he's been through. This is just a really awful day/fic to be him right now and I swear to gosh I added that 'Angst with a Happy Ending' tag for a reason bc it is going to get better just... not yet.

There was no good news to be shared at their morning briefing on the Sasaki Haise situation. Yonebayashi had no idea what she was expecting, but for some reason, she had psyched herself up at the prospect of a reunion. However, all she achieved in hoping to leave with some shred of optimism about anything was that much more disappointment when nothing happened. No trace of Sasaki Haise, of her Maman. 

It was time to start searching for him for real. She didn’t even want to think about what that meant. There was no such thing as a search that wasn’t ‘for real’. Urie just had the rare shred of kindness not to look down at her and say the search for Sasaki Haise was now a search to destroy, that if she saw her dear Maman again, it would be with her hammer coming down on his head.

Somehow, she felt worse than she did the first time it sank in that Maman was gone. Never in a million years would she have ever thought that possible, yet there she was, standing listless in the hall, wanting nothing more than to hide under her blankets and never come out again. It was like all the grey and gloom that hung above her each day without Maman had been packed into a giant lead ball and thrown square at her chest. 

“Mucchan… Is it just me? This grey feeling?”

“I believe in him.” Mutsuki put a hand on her shoulder. “He had to have his reasons.” As if she wasn’t telling herself that every depressing day since Maman abandoned them. They must have been some good reasons. Would that he had left them with some inkling as to what they were, maybe a goodbye, something. That said, she forced herself to smile. The last thing she wanted was to cut her time short with the found family she did still have, or end it on a bitter note. “I mean, he was so nice to us, wasn’t he?”

“I…” Her heart couldn’t take another loss. It really couldn’t. But the smell was so strong up close as he tried to comfort her. “I want you to tell me the truth,” she said with all the resolve she could summon. “There’s something you’ve been hiding, isn’t there?” He smelled of blood, human, and worst of all, fresh. At least in asking about it, she held out hope that he might tell her something she wanted to hear, explain it away somehow.

“So you’ve noticed,” said Mutsuki in a hushed voice. He withdrew the hand from her shoulder and began fidgeting, his eyes trained to the floor. “That I’m, uh… That I’m trans.” 

“No.” She already knew that. Well, she had a feeling, but she figured he would tell her when -and if- he wanted to. “That’s not what I-” 

“Tooru!” Before she could finish, First Class Hogi came down the hall and cut in between them, calling for Mutsuki with that subtle ‘yes, it’s more important than whatever you’re doing right now’ edge that all senior investigators seemed to have mastered. Saiko couldn’t blame him for murmuring a quick apology and saying goodbye to her right then, but a selfish part of her still wished he would stay and tell her where the blood came from.

Hogi led him back the way she came. Her hurried steps suggested what she needed was urgent, but she explained nothing until they were in the elevator, going down for a reason Mutsuki hadn’t the foggiest impression of. They hadn’t worked together since Suzuya lent him to the Hachikawa squad, so any guess seemed fair game.

“Sorry, Tooru. I didn’t mean to interrupt anything,” she said as she pressed the button for the ground floor. “Special Class Suzuya needs you.” He must have kept her number after Rushima, or hers was the first name to come up in his work contacts of someone who was in the Chiyoda field office that day. Either way, he couldn’t reach Mutsuki, his phone having been turned off during his meeting, so he called her. “He didn’t give me any details, but something happened with your case. He said he texted you the address.” And to get there immediately.

They parted ways after the elevator stopped, Hogi to do whatever she was doing before Suzuya called, and Mutsuki to take a van to the location Suzuya sent him. He had to look through his inbox for said location. Suzuya, never quick to give up, had left him two missed calls and five texts before getting Hogi to relay a message. Though persistent, however, he was not without mercy; four of the five texts said the exact same thing:

 **SC Suzuya**  
geidai. now. fill u in when u get here.

Nakarai received him at the art university in Taito, in the parking lot. Suzuya was getting just about ready to send everyone to their places, so the job fell on his deputy to bring Mutsuki up to speed, walking and talking as they met up with the rest of the squad on the fine arts side of campus. The short version, Nakarai told him; Ishida was here. Not her unidentified minion but her, herself.

The long version, they were piecing together. Details were few and far between, but from some quick and informal questions answered by students and daytime staff, they had an idea what was up. The school had been evacuated somewhere between 10:30 and 10:45 in the morning. She was there when teachers began unlocking classrooms, lashed out at a few of them, but evidently did so with no intent to kill. A few students were injured in the residence halls during the initial panic, and some unlucky early birds in the studios barely got out alive, but the only fatalities seemed to be custodians and nighttime security. She had to have made a point to get on campus before most of it was even awake. Less bloodshed, but more freedom to get where she wanted to go without interference, and to get all her pieces in place.

“What kind of pieces? Did she display another body?”

“Bodies!” said Suzuya, popping up between them, the others close by at that point. “And it’s a living exhibit, this time.” At least five other ghouls, or perhaps people, hiding behind identical black coats and plague masks, no way of telling which one was in fact Ishida Azusa until they fought. “Here’s the fun part,” by the strained definition of ‘fun’ that wasn’t really fun at all. “Each one is in a different building!” So that was why he needed the entire squad. “We’re pairing up and taking them one at a time ‘til we find her.”

“You don’t think the whole point is to spread us thin?” Mid-ranking ghoul who could never single-handedly fight six people unless those people were in some altered state, spread-out network of buildings and compartments, arranging her pawns to draw them to different corners of a wide battlefield, “I know I just got here, but it sounds like a trap.”

“Of course it’s a trap.” That was why Suzuya was taking the risk of losing her to at least keep them in pairs. “But if we’re gonna figure out a flaw or something we can use, we kinda have to walk into it.” 

With that, they joined the remaining half of the squad in the middle of their hemisphere of campus. Suzuya gathered them all around him before he finished talking. “They’re spread pretty far apart, so chances are, her little coven doesn’t have the real-time coordination to realize we’re picking them off and run." Other people were disposable to her. She was the last person to give herself five-plus distractions to look after when they served their purpose just by being there. “That’s about the only edge we’ve got for now, so let’s not waste it! Keep each other in the loop at all times. Patch everyone in on everything!” They could use their advantage of communication to put together a better plan as they went.

“Yes sir!” five voices said in unison. 

“Mizurou and Nakarai, you guys start with the art museum. Hanbee and Mikage, metal shop. Message me for your next assignment.” He then turned to a confused Mutsuki, having paired their partners off with each other. “Tooru, you’ll take the factory building with me.”

“But, Suzuya sir…” Abara looked down at Mutsuki, then at Suzuya, eyebrows knit with concern. “That thing we talked about,” he said in a hushed voice. 

“Why do you think I’m mixing it up?” 

Abara looked down at his shoes and nodded in defeated understanding. Mutsuki did his best not to read into it, but Abara’s gaze went to him one more time, their eyes meeting for a split second, as he turned away from Suzuya. He had seen Abara nervous and he had seen him worried about Suzuya. In that brief glance at each other, he saw both written all over him. 

He kept quiet, though. No better way to ignite a confrontation than with a ‘why don’t you trust me all of a sudden?” in front of the entire squad. Once Suzuya gave the order and the squad dispersed, he followed him away from Abara and Mikage without a word, let alone a question.

The factory building was made up of three complexes, all joined together into a single structure. Every step echoed off the concrete floor, resonating from the featureless walls and textile equipment until they faded into the seemingly endless space. Suzuya assured him that the noise wasn’t a problem. He could hear someone, probably hiding up in the rafters or somewhere in the shadows. They were being watched whether they were quiet or not. 

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” he called up to the ceiling just to prove his point. Nothing ambushed them or tried to kill them, even though it was impossible not to have heard him. Their mark would attack when they wanted to.

Just because they could make noise, however, that didn’t mean they did. After that one loud moment, the complex was quiet. Mutsuki’s chest grew tighter and tighter with every step, nothing but their own footfall to keep him out of his head. The silence between him and Suzuya made his internal voice berate him so much louder, made all the things he could say to fill it grow so much heavier in his throat. 

When all was quiet around him, everything else on his mind began to scream, and that morning, late but still morning, little more occupied his mind than the bridge. He could keep missing time and strange dreams to himself, but after that encounter, he was no longer so sure what carnage he would reap if he didn’t break his guilty vow of silence. The stranger, with a chainsaw in their sports bag that smelled of bodies, was not a dream. They were real, deep pink scars where his knees were functional but still healing in case he doubted it. The danger was real.

Mutsuki felt the exact tug he felt after that fight he still only remembered in pieces, the same foreboding that drove him to follow Suzuya down the hall despite being the one who told him to go away. The image of Suzuya sawed to pieces flashed through his mind, so vivid he could smell the blood. It was so much easier to lie or keep his mouth shut when the fear of losing him was a fear of losing him alive and in one piece. 

“Juuzou…” he said in that same tentative squeak, once again afraid of what would happen if he spoke, but so terrified of what could happen if he stayed quiet that one fear numbed the other and left him just brave enough to do the right thing.

“Hm?” Suzuya kept his eyes moving around the complex, following the faintest noises he heard to try and spot something moving, but Mutsuki had to trust he was listening. 

“Can I tell you something?” Suzuya nodded. “I know we can’t talk about everything now, but…” As he turned his thoughts to what to confess first, the terrible picture of Suzuya’s dismembered body faded, but the smell didn’t. It only got stronger as they ventured deeper into the building. Much stronger. A silent apology whispered itself to Suzuya in his head, for his confession would have to wait. “This way!” 

Mutsuki turned and ran through the second complex, knives in his hands and ready for combat, paying no heed to whether or not Suzuya was still behind him. It was too fresh and too much to be the residual stain from a grazed evacuee. Someone was still in the building, and if the gore he detected was all theirs, they were in grave danger. 

Weaving around and vaulting over equipment to catch up with him, Suzuya almost saw himself slapped in the face by what Mutsuki followed to the third complex, and not in a figurative sense. A very literal hand swung right at optimal slapping height, attached to a human forearm, hanging from a chain attached to a beam above them, and he narrowly dodged the brush of its palm against his cheek. It would not be an Ishida scene without a victim displayed somewhere, and oh, did she display her eighth.

“Whoa…” Suzuya exclaimed under his breath. Not that Victim Number 8 was the nastiest thing he had ever seen, not even close, but they easily made the top ten for most effort put into a crime scene. The third complex had been meticulously decorated with a sort of human curtain. 

Limbs, disarticulated into upper arm and lower arm, upper leg and lower leg, dangled over and alongside their heads. It took a closer look to see how many it had been cut into, but the torso hung in smaller pieces, seemingly cut between vertebrae along the spine. Number 8's organs lay scattered at their feet, save for the ones long enough or with some structure to suspend on a chain. Blood, among other bodily fluids, still dripped and oozed from everything, the higher-hanging parts landing a drop or so on his head as he stepped under them. They were a recent kill.

Suzuya found Mutsuki frozen and wide-eyed in the middle of the complex. Save for a slight tremor in his Ifraft hand and the shallow rise and fall of his chest, he looked like a statue, staring down at a sewing table arranged like a cot beneath a mobile. Propped up on the table, eyes open and a deep gash across one cheek, was the victim’s head. The cut on their face, Suzuya noticed, didn’t drip, though he and Mutsuki stood in a pool of the blood still raining generously over the edge of the table.


	10. Loose Ends

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *tchalla voice* as you can see, i am not dead! life happened again. please don't murder me. i mean, go ahead murder me for the content bc i deserve that, but don't murder me for taking so long. i might not be quick or even consistent at updating and that's not changing probably ever, but over my dead body will this fic ever be abandoned. 
> 
> on another note, since neither are in the tags and idk if they're recurring enough to put in the tags, let me just warn you: mutsuki's deadname (yes, 'tooru' is considered unisex and could have very well been his birth name but trust me, it's significant later on that the character who uses it uses it, so i'm making it my headcanon that he changed it from something else) is brought up, and several overtly ableist remarks are made toward suzuya in this chapter.

Mutsuki couldn’t tear his eyes from the empty gaze of his victim. Like Torso, he didn’t remember the act, but he remembered enough to deduce they were his. Same slick black hair, same angular face, and the cut looked several hours old, consistent with the timeline if he had a shred of doubt.

 _Who’s there?_ Quinques unclipped and put away, he reached for a knife on the counter. Tentative, holding it ready to slash, he crept down the hall, where he swore he heard something drag across wood. Something moved and he lunged, the blade coming so close to finding flesh. Too close.

Just in time to save his little life, Patches emerged from the shadows, definitely his innocent self and not another predator lying in wait. Mutsuki went still, eyes staring at nothing down the hall, arms hanging limp at his sides as Patches wove around and rubbed against his legs. Nothing had changed. Not in any real sense.

God, he could all but hear Suzuya’s voice calling out for their cat, calling and calling until he finally turned to him and asked where Patches was, trusting him, suspecting nothing. Rent to bite-size chunks somewhere, Mutsuki would know. Maybe he would try to tell Suzuya otherwise, but Suzuya would look anywhere he told him until he ran out of lies to tell. He loved that cat. They both did, yet he almost attacked him with a kitchen knife.

Mutsuki sank to his knees and set the knife down beside them. A few seconds of staring at it, thinking about his beloved pet in a jar, he pushed it further across the floor and watched it skitter out of his reach. Just in case. _Hey there._ He murmured any soothing thing he could think of and scratched between Patches’ velvety white ears. Patches rubbed his cheek into his hand in return. Hopefully, that meant he was forgiven. _Sorry if I scared you. I’m so sorry. So, so sorry._

Patches followed him as he picked up the knife and brought it back to the kitchenette. Suzuya must have forgotten to put it away before he left for Rushima, but it had a place. Especially now, that place was not in Mutsuki’s hand.

He opened the silverware drawer with a sigh, weary of himself. This was who he was now: the worst of both worlds, paranoid and a murderer. Try as he might to keep it down, the thought crept up again; _it’s only a matter of time._

Something moved. Just Patches again. That was what he told himself, until he felt the warmth of his furry body against his leg. Another shadow. Stepping back, grip tightening around the knife still in his hand, he turned to face it. Not Patches, but not anything else either. All movement with no form.

The third flash had color, a streak of white across the other side of the periphery. Before he could register the rational voice telling him it was another shapeless creation of his hypervigilant imagination, he was staring out the kitchen window into iron grey eyes. Grey eyes stared right back, familiar as the numbing surface of slate over his head, like a bad formative experience, the event forgotten but the lesson clear as day: grey didn’t always equal safe.

The same grey stared at him from the sewing table, their body fresh and eyes not yet clouded over. That somehow-familiar dull, stormy glare fixed to him as if still alive to place blame. He didn’t remember looking too close at their eyes on the bridge, but somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew it was the same person. He had cut them so much deeper than he thought.

“Oh, Tooru?” Suzuya interrupted, giving him a little nudge to the side. “You gotta move. I’m sending this to the squad.” He nudged him just a bit harder. The unwarned touch shocked Mutsuki all the way out of his staring match with the decapitated head.

Mutsuki turned and backed out of the shot. Suzuya then snapped a photo of the sewing table and put it in the group text, piece by piece. The body parts too, he turned to capture as much of as he could, camera lens running over the whole complex in a panoramic burst. One second too late, he saw the glimmer of red beginning to appear in the frame.

The phone fell to the floor. Suzuya took Mutsuki with him by the arm and pulled them both behind the sewing table. However hard he grabbed him, he told himself; it had to be better way to get his head in the game than a kagune through his face. Impact shook the room as Suzuya kicked the table onto its side. It landed heavy on both concrete and kagune, their assailant hissing in pain.

Kicking the sewing table over only bought him a second. Pieces of pieces fell like raindrops around Suzuya as he vaulted, armed and ready, over its edge. It landed with a thundering _boom!_ towards a corner of the complex only moments after he did. Shining red and black caught the back of Jason’s head, an agile bikaku trying to disarm him. Suzuya pried Jason from its snakelike grip and brought the sharp side down on the ghoul behind it.

“Well, that was fast,” they said, chuckling through their mask. “I thought he would start going rancid before you found me.” Broken chain and flesh hit the concrete again as their voice circled around him. He missed. And he lost them.

Their form cut in and out, broken into shadowy fragments behind hanging parts. His eyes followed movement just to hear them speak from the opposite direction. “You are smarter than you look, Special Class Suzuya.”

He thought he heard them again and lunged. A suspended arm and leg dropped at his feet. Their kagune, long and thin, brushed against the chains like a baton over bars on a cage. Rattling metal whispered and teased in both ears. Four resonant walls threw every _clink!_ and jangle back at him. Sound bounced from every direction.

Fingers tapped at his shoulder and he pivoted around. Jason followed and caught more nothing. A soft _plip!_ on his head, and he looked up. He was standing under a dripping piece of torso. The wetness kept trailing down his scalp, trickling onto his forehead and making his skin crawl under it, not that different from a hand or a finger doing the same.

He was still looking when a dark shape zipped past him. He attacked and found himself right up close and personal with more human bait. Sanguine muscle and gore swung from what looked like everywhere, every reddish thing in the complex close enough to matching shades. “Not that smart, though, I suppose.” The ghoul, confirmed to be a ghoul, mocked him again.

Another movement saw Jason through another blood-drenched slab of flesh, like Suzuya was a heavily armed cat chasing a laser pointer. A red laser pointer in a room full of jingling red toys, all swinging around his head. “Not that smart at all.”

That was the last thing they said before it all stopped. Every moving part gradually went still. Chains and pieces slowed down almost to a halt. Their kagune vanished from his sight and didn’t come back. Like the cat with its eyes trained to its prey, he too stopped moving and just listened. No rattling. No voices. For a moment, the scene was on pause, nothing to see and nothing to hear, just still.

Then he felt it. Like he had stepped in a tank of centipedes with pins for legs, something brushed against his left ankle. He pivoted on the matching ball of his foot and drove Jason deep into the floor. The closest feeling he knew to pain lingered but the touch itself ceased, their kagune pinned like a bug in a display case, Jason sticking from the concrete as the needle.

They proved easier to spot when they were struggling, obviously out of sync with the gentle swing of the chains, to get free. Like Ariadne’s string, he followed their willowy precision instrument to the rest of them, knives from up his sleeves in each hand. Just as their mask turned to face him, one knife sent a crack down its ivory beak. The other stuck in the base and twisted the whole thing apart.

Suzuya dodged their untrained hands and drew another handful of knives before coming up behind them and closing the gap again. Their hat was thick. Reinforced with something, flexible like any old interfacing but much harder to break. Protection. Disposables didn’t get protection.

“Tooru! Get the squad over here!” he called, loud enough to be heard from any corner of the complex, as a knife embedded in the protective layer. No reason to spread themselves thinner than needed over her pawns. “And you.” His attention zeroed back in on the ghoul.

Without missing a beat, he drove his other blade as deep as he could. He dragged his hand down, taking her hat and underlying cowl with it. “You underestimate me…” His grip went loose around its handle. All he picked up in the follow-through dropped and he reloaded full seconds before he heard it land.

Broken enamel crunched like snow at both their feet, ground finer and finer with each nimble step. He put enough distance between them to lunge at the vulnerable grey head now open to attack. The ghoul about faced to him and his relaxed smile grew just a little pleased with himself. “Ishida Azusa.”

He was back on her before their eyes could meet. She whipped her kagune towards him and he dodged. As it zoomed by, he closed in on her. His weight went into the false bottom of his prosthetic. His blade plunged to the floor, ready to come down on any face or cranium in its path. But before his knife hit resistance, he heard something else break.

The sound started out like potato chips under shoes, too light to be a crunch but too many little sounds to really call it a crack. With each step deeper the noise grew, he dropped deeper into his stance. His remaining knives hit the floor in a rain of metallic clatters. He leaned further and further, unable to stop, and saw Ishida’s kagune doubling back between his feet. No, not _between_ them. Into them. Like he did when he forgot to look down on his way up a flight of stairs, a phantom step lying evilly in wait, he was falling.

He gave into it and threw himself to the concrete. On his way down, he grabbed a free knife before curling into a ball and rolling. Bits of his shattered prosthetic dug into his spine as each vertebra lent him speed. With as much power as he could pack into it, his toes pushed underneath him and he popped up onto one foot.

“Tsk tsk tsk,” he heard behind him. “Back in my day, the CCG at least knew not to put their handicapped back in the field, let alone to make them their top investigators. How many capable Doves had to die in one sitting for them to resort to you, I wonder?”

Before he could follow her voice, a heavy bootprint hit his middle back and knocked him right back down. He started to get up and she kicked him again, with her heel. “Shame on you, Special Class,” she said, eyes running over him and a half-smile on her face. “All my secrets at your fingertips, and this is what you come at me with?” Another kick went to his ribs. “I have taken out much greater powerhouses than you. Did it ever occur to you to wonder how?”

“A little hard to do that- _oof!_ ” Another to his abdomen before he could bring his limbs back in to defend it. “With no bodies!” He smiled up at her, stretching his mouth open as slow as he could, teeth stained red and a mucousy string of drool and mouth blood climbing down his lower lip. “We know about the hunting kills, all those civilians from the hospital.” Easy meals. None of them stood a chance anyhow. The only one who ever did sure as hell didn’t now, so Ishida needed to stay on him. Just him. “But what did you do with the ones in your email, Azusa?” The ones that SS-rank ghouls and big organizations hired her to take care of, that even Aogiri Tree wouldn’t touch with their own hands. The real gods and monsters. “Pretty obvious you weren’t eating them. Not all of them, anyway!” His gaze stayed fixed to her, as much as he wanted to scan the room for Mutsuki. “Maybe you threw your leftovers in the ocean, ‘swimming with the fishes’ and all!”

“Ha! Of course it didn’t. Your broken wing isn’t the only defect you hide behind that cute, arrogant little smile.” She kicked him one last time, too fast for him to get a palm on the floor. “Perhaps that’s why you’re so obvious, when you think you’re stalling.”

He tumbled backwards. The unforgiving top of the sewing table jarred his head forward as it received the base of his skull. “My friends might not be the strongest, but they won’t let yours get through them. Not without dragging it out,” said Ishida. “You and me, on the other hand, we’re through dragging it out, don’t you think?” Suzuya thrashed and clawed in vain at her kagune gingerly brushing against his skin.

But before she could finish him off, another shining tail came between them. Red and black turned to lab-engineered taupe in front of Suzuya’s face. Exoskeletal segments flashed through his field of vision like cars on a bullet train speeding into the mouth of a tunnel.

Mutsuki’s voice rose to something between a growl and a scream through clenched teeth as he pushed Ishida away. Their two kagunes grated against each other with a metallic screech. He lunged the second her more supple weapon gave in, knives searching for nothing but a way to drive her back, as far as possible from Suzuya.

He stopped feeling his shoes slide on the cement, stopped noticing the touch of hanging parts to his hair. Every half-guided slash of his quinques bled into the next without relent or second thought. For a moment, nothing in his mind existed save for the thing he was protecting Suzuya from. For one ephemeral, easily broken moment, he was Rank I Mutsuki.

“Back in fighting shape already, I see,” Ishida said, amused. Her kagune held its ground between his blade and her face. “You were always blessed like that.” _Perfect. You healed nicely. Some kids are blessed like that._ “Such a resilient little thorn in my side, aren’t you, Honoka?”

Mutsuki slowed to a flaccid halt, a moment of regression just long enough to see him thrown up to the ceiling. His head hit the roof, chipped tin ringing in his ears. Even tin, even ringing, he barely heard it over the name he never thought he would have to hear again, 20 inner voices yelling and whispering and speaking it in 20 different keys. Ten years, and it pierced through his chest just as quick and intense as it did ten minutes after he first buried it. _Honoka._

The penetrating jab in his sternum wasn’t all bad memories. Ishida caught him in the air and tossed him, like an invertebrate ragdoll, back up with her kagune. Blood caught in his throat with every desperate gasp for air. His third time down, a mouthful spurt past his lips, flavorless against the acrid edge of bile over his tongue. Only then did she let him fall to the floor. Before he could get to his feet, another red-black streak tore across him, turning liquid red spit-up dark brown and gritty.

He struggled just to stay on all fours, feeling blindly for a knife, both lost somewhere between the ceiling and the floor. His right hand found Abskol and grabbed any part it could. Blood spilled from his palm as the serrated bite of quinque steel radiated through its densely-packed nerve endings. Some connection missed between head and trembling hand, he drew back only to keep reaching for Abskol, grabbing it by the blade over and over, no matter how slippery it became with his blood.

“Oh, calm down. I didn’t spend three years planning this just to kill you now,” said Ishida. Her black rubber boot pressed against his shoulder. Something deep in the hidden corners of his mind told him to run, to hide, to pray, as he looked up into her ice blue eyes, but alas, he could barely keep on his hands and knees, let alone save himself. “You’ll be just fine, resilient little thorn.” She chuckled, a demure, quiet chuckle in the back of her throat. “At least it isn’t your head.”

“Juuzou…” was the last thing out of his mouth, slurred and hardly a whisper, before her white visage and the grey of the factory complex became mottled with black. A sound of kagune-on-metal impact rang in his head. Something soft and corporeal hit sheer cement. Then his monochrome world went silent. Penumbra darkened to umbra and unconsciousness fully eclipsed his senses before he could see who had the upper hand.

When he woke up, bright white light shined in his eyes, a high, monotone ring still in his ears. White. Moonlit white. He recoiled from it and something pulled tight at his ribcage. Afraid he was being cut in half, his hand went to where he felt it pull.

A piece of his arm stung when he moved it too fast, as if telling him ‘don’t do that’. Heeding the sting, he ran his fingers gently over the tightness. The familiar raised texture of stitches on skin prompted him to look to his side, almost expecting someone there beside him. When he looked over, however, all he saw was his own solitary shoulder and pale blue sheets. Further away from himself, a guardrail in front of a curtain. Closer, he was wearing a cotton gown. Both curtain and gown matched the sheets, the same light powder blue.

Blackish sutures peeked out from his loose neckline. Underneath, his eyes followed the trail of mattress stitching to, as he felt them, the side of his ribcage. He tried too vehemently and failed to sit up, hindered by another unexpected pull of sutures across his stomach and another brachial sting. That time, he traced the latter to an IV threatening to rip from his forearm if he wasn’t a little more mindful of his surroundings. Another dose of said mindfulness, and the fluorescent lights buzzing in the ceiling, upon a second white-hot glance, were too bright to be the moon.

As it set in, where he was, he realized the noise around him wasn’t the ringing in his ears from the complex or even the electric drone of the lights. People were talking, close by. If he focused, he could pick out Abara’s gentle bass hum over Nakarai’s stilted tenor.

He knew, in his mind, it was the squad, but not without a moment of doubt. The sound felt off. Something was missing, some high harmony that made them sound like them. Still listening, trying to name the void in their combined noise, Mutsuki sat up and their voices played a discordant attempt at a note in unison, like a pianist bringing their fingers down before getting all of them in place and neglecting to hit one of the keys. They all stopped talking and turned to him before he got to the point of processing words.

“Mutsuki. You’re awake,” said Nakarai, standing at his bedside with crossed arms. He kept talking, his voice blurring into background noise as Mutsuki looked from one side of the hospital-blue curtain around them to another. Mizurou stood to Nakarai’s right shoulder, Abara and Mikage to the left. Without a word, his eyes went from Mizurou to Abara again, then all around the emergency room enclosure. As his darting gaze grew more and more frantic, the nameless void started to take a real shape.

“Where is he?” Mutsuki murmured it at first. _Where is he?! Where is he?! Where is he?!!!_ “Nakarai...” His voice shook with the rest of his body, heavy and low to mask the terror burning in his throat. “Where is Juuzou?”


	11. Homo Homini Lupus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm mentally just so done w this chapter and i am not fixing it any more than i already have by proofreading it a million more times. ngl i'm just happy if it's readable. 
> 
> on an actual content-related note though, i've always wanted to explore the concept of suzuya in peril. like, how he would handle it differently from a character more like kaneki or mutsuki, as well as how a captor would make him suffer or what kind of captor could, given how he's wired differently (and physically more capable of fighting) than the characters we have seen as captives in canon. and speaking of wired differently, maybe his indifference to pain is psychological but ishida (sui) never explicitly says, and obviously i very strongly headcanon him as autistic so i read it as a sensory thing. probably because i am also an autistic person who is hyposensitive to pain and has trouble with self-injury.

Fine cement. Smooth metal. Man-made ice. Whatever hard surface pressed against his back, it was flat and cool to the touch. All down the back of him was cool. The sole of his foot too. Two walls, but when he tried to shuffle his foot into the edge he knew he would find somewhere, he wobbled. 

So, Suzuya figured; he was standing up. That made one plane a wall, the other a floor. He was indoors. Indoors could be a room, a cell, anywhere. He had but one way to find out which.

But he opened his eyes and saw nothing. Just black. Endless black. He moved his eyebrows and squeezed his eyes shut a few times. Nothing over his face. It was truly dark. Dark but not silent.

There was a TV on upstairs. He could hear the music and characters whispering to him through another wall. It had to be an old TV. The kind that buzzed with static as long as it was on, just buzzing in the background underneath the sound and dialogue. Except he didn’t know if there was an upstairs for a TV to play in. He still had no idea where he was.

He moved his eyes from one side to another, just to look around one more time. On second glance, a blacker streak than the black around him slithered into the corner of his eye, glimmering like petroleum oil against ink. When it stopped, it blended in with the vacant space, invisible until, out of nowhere, it decided to strike. He tried to dodge the formless movement snapping towards his eye and he almost fell over again. 

Moving, though, made him realize how uncomfortable he was. Like a metal dowel stuck through his spine, he stood rigid, so tense his body trembled. Once he tasted a single drop of relief from the living rigor mortis seizing every last muscle and nerve, he couldn’t stand still. He bent. He stretched. He twisted. He writhed in desperation to relieve the tension about to make his body snap to pieces at the joints.

Writhing turned to thrashing and as he thrashed harder, his shoulders touched his ears. It almost came as a shock to remember he had arms. They were raised up, hands over his head. Oh yeah. That was what he had been thinking about before his thoughts raced in some direction he was already starting to forget. He was figuring out where he was. What was going on. How to get out of it. 

One hand wouldn’t move, save for a slight roll to either side, tied to something. The other moved a little but hit some sudden stop as he took it further away from the warmth. Each time he brought it to the stopping place, metal jingled in his ear. Chain, smaller than at the factory complex, but bigger than a necklace. He had a bond around each wrist, two different kinds, but one around each. 

The big black snake disintegrated into a pit of vipers, two or three little movements popping out of the dark and striking at his face again, and again, as if trying on purpose to distract him. The TV kept whispering in his ear, more and more shows playing at the same time, but he closed his eyes and hummed over the noise as he kept feeling around. 

Whatever he was tied to felt solid enough to break a digit against. He could break his thumbs. It would give him enough slack to slip out. Freeing himself was a start, so he found an unforgiving enough position and began to twist. 

Before he could hear it crack, however, a knob clicked and a door creaked open. Lights flickered on and he could see everything. The space was a room, the wall and floor cement. The chain was a pair of handcuffs, quinque steel, like the kind he kept concealed on him. Except he was stripped down to his underwear, incapable of concealing a thing. Maybe the cuffs were his. Not that it was important. What was important was that one was around his hand. The other was locked to the chain that connected them, holding it in a loop around a big steel pipe over his head. His other hand was held to the pipe with a two-column tie and some red rope. Not his.

“Toshio told me about your pain tolerance. Clearly, he wasn’t exaggerating,” Ishida said as she came down the stairs. There were in fact stairs. He was facing the side of them, able to take a look under them if her rubber-gloved hand didn’t seize him by the jaw and turn his head directly to her. “He also said you were a chewer.” She took his lower lip in her other hand and pulled it back from his gums. “I’m surprised your Madam didn’t pull out all your teeth. The blackened look must have been off trend when she took you.” 

He ran his tongue over the inside of his mouth once she let him go. His lips felt like ground meat. Now that he was thinking about it, they tasted like it too, uncooked and bloody. Deep-rooted chunks of flesh came off like pilling fleece with a little help, big enough to have their own wet, stringy mouth feel and a solid bite between his incisors. Even for him, he had chewed himself up bad. 

His tied hand, when Ishida freed them and he got a good look at it, had several blush-colored patches of skin in the few places with direct contact to the warm metal. His cuffed hand glistened reddish-pink from his knuckles to his wrists. Opened blisters, pale yellowish and translucent, stuck to the clear fluid oozing from the worst of his burns. She had bound him to a vent pipe, the attached water heater over in the corner. That put them somewhere too small for a boiler. 

“Geez, you really hate him!” he teased as she transferred him from the pipe to a black wooden chair, awfully permanent for an agile contract killer. Yet another tribute to how all-consumingly important her latest hang-up was. “What did Tooru do to deserve all this?” 

“What makes you think I even know who you’re talking about?” She crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow. Her ‘denial’ fooled Suzuya until she chuckled at him. “Did _ Tooru _ tell you about me? Or are you a slightly more competent Dove than I took you for?” Less than a second, she stood there before got back to work, laying a sheet of thick, black plastic over the floor and smoothing it out around the chair. “Frankly, I’m having a hard time deciding which sounds more absurd.”

“You wanna talk about it, Zuchan?” He couldn’t tilt his head, but he looked up at her, unblinking. That brought her hand to her cart. An innocent question, and she picked up a drill in reply. “I know what’s up,” Suzuya lied. “It’s not like the details are gonna make a difference for you.” Unless she called his bullshit. “How did a 12-year-old kid get on Ishida  _ fucking _ Azusa’s hit list?”

“That’s the worst part, isn’t it? He was nothing when he ruined me.” She held the drill bit to his chest. “And yet, Mutsuki Tooru is the reason I was captured.” Her finger tightened around the trigger and the drill screamed to life. 

Suzuya had never been drilled into before. It felt like someone strong driving their thumb into his collarbone, but also like something was moving around in there, some little spinning creature burrowing into his skin and twisting itself comfortable. But mostly just the pushing. He squirmed against his restraints as the drill bit twisted its way back out. 

“Buuut,” he took the childlike lift in his voice as far as he could, as soon as the motor stopped and he could hear himself. “He wasn’t even a cadet or anything back then. How’s that work?”

“I left his home with an empty body bag and a gash in my head. The latter was a clean cut, right through the frontal lobe. Motor skills, planning, problem-solving… intelligence." So he and Abara had been onto something, when they found the only police report in Chuo circa 2007 involving an axe. And he had more than a loosely tied theory to buy time with. "Tell me, Special Class Suzuya, approximately how long would a wound like that take to regenerate?”

“Long.” He failed Ghoul Anatomy as a cadet. He had no idea in months or years. But he knew it was months or years. Nerves, brain tissue, anything made of neurons was the absolute slowest thing to repair.

“So do you think I was in any condition to hunt, no plans and no preparation, the night after?” Suzuya shook his head. “I could have evaded the Doves who caught me easily, had his axe never come down on my head. Instead, I was in Cochlea six years before I was myself again,” she said with a faint growl. 

The drill bit poked near the top of Suzuya’s sternum. Ishida powered it on again and it burrowed into his chest just like the first time. He shifted a little at the moving part under his skin. It was uncomfortable, as she perforated the other side of the first hole too, moving then up one of his clavicles, heading towards his shoulder, like a maggot worming its way into his bones.

“Okay, so?” he said. “Why burn everything you’ve got over someone who’s gonna die one day anyway? Pretty obvious you’ve still got it.” 

“And what makes you think that?” said Ishida. “Had I  _ 10 _ of the hundreds of connections I did before Cochlea, I could do much more than make sure your squad got assigned my recapture. Three months ago, even that was a stretch.” She positioned the drill again. “The lower floors were planning a break when I asked myself just what it was I expected to accomplish. Seven years, I had been in a box by then. Only the Doves remembered me anymore, with a detailed analysis of my behavior, a mugshot of my bare face on file, and a sample of my blood in their lab. And to top it off, my best client is dead.” The bit pressed into him again, almost but not quite breaking the skin. “I can’t have my calling back, so I will settle for the one who took it.”

“Uh-huh.” She wasn’t as connected as they thought. That meant someone in what network she had was. Who, Suzuya wondered, could get their hands on her supplies? Who did her Black Cat have to be? He wouldn’t have time to figure it out if he didn’t keep her monologuing. “What are you gonna do to him?”

“I’ll decide that when your teammates come for you.” Ishida chuckled. “Perhaps you can help me figure out where to start. I have always loved a challenge.”

She discarded the drill after one last hole, where his collarbone met the top of his shoulder, before grabbing a box of gauze from her cart. She set it in her lap and reached again to grab a handful of foil packets. She tore one open and brought the towelette inside to his chest, smooth and freezing cold in the drafty room. Alcohol.

“Dressing my wounds, Zuchan? You sure that’s how torture works?” Mama never dressed his wounds. She never bothered to disinfect the dirty stone floor, nor her rusty, bloodstained tools, nor the cuts and punctures and everything else under the sun that she made with those gross tools on that gross floor. There were thousands of beautiful children out there, if he went into septic shock one day and died.

“Of course,” said Ishida. “Maybe your mind can take it, but the human body is the human body,” she explained while she tossed the bloody towelette into a small trash can at her feet and took out the gauze. “In over 30 years as a surgeon, you learn right away, no matter what friends and relatives will tell themselves for comfort, that no one is a fighter. You’re just as susceptible to injury and death as anyone else. And it really wouldn’t do to have you losing too much blood or, god forbid, getting an infection when I still haven’t figured you out.”

“Huh.” He wasn’t disposable. What, he wondered, made him not disposable? It had to be more than his figure, and she definitely didn’t like him. “Can’t you replace me with just about anyone in Tokyo if you kill me?” She had the means and the upper hand to do it. “Why am I so special?”

“For one…” Ishida traded the gauze and first aid supplies for a nail gun. “You intrigue me.” She got up from her stool and presumably took a knee on the floor, for everything but the top of her head disappeared. “But for the most part, you mean an awful lot to my young friend, Tooru.” 

The nail gun pressed against the top of his foot. A staccato  _ ka-chk!  _ and he felt a similar pinprick of pressure to the drill. But the nails didn’t twist and turn, and judging by the feeling of  _ something _ standing in the sole of his foot, stroking it when he gave it an experimental wiggle, Ishida put the nails all the way through. That could be a problem. He didn’t know if he had the raw strength to rip what felt like a big nail out of bone. Let alone a wooden chair. “Now Tooru, not strong per se, but his will is. Do you know why I love to work on people like that?”

He felt the nail gun against his metatarsal. “The physical suffering can only go so far. You take what gives them their resolve, whether it be a person, a thing, an idea, and you destroy it before their eyes. Make them see there’s no point in being so strong. That there is no ‘strong enough’ to win, so why play indestructable?”  _ Ka-chk!  _ “They soften right up when you take away the reason they have so much resolve to begin with. Believe me, Special Class, as much fun as it will be to make him bleed as many times over as I want with that artificial kakuhou keeping him from death, I am really enjoying the mind break.” The nail gun hopped up his metatarsal until it reached the joint of his ankle. 

It made sense. He had lived a version of it, after all. Like the Romans dragging Jesus Christ to the cross and nailing him to it in front of all his loyal followers, or Mr. Shinohara lying incapacitated on a rooftop in Nerima. Take away their idols, and an impenetrable mind dissolved into mush. 

But something didn’t add up. If she wanted to destroy every reason Mutsuki had to be strong, then why was he the only one in the basement? Maybe the whole squad was dead already. Then again, what was it she said before? She would decide what to do when  _ his squad _ came for him. They couldn’t do that when they were dead. 

“And what if I’m not all that special to him?” he asked, deadpan. He was most definitely not the only thing to keep Mutsuki going. That had to mean she wasn’t stopping with him. Suzuya could figure out that much, but how she planned to do it… he needed an inkling from her.

“Irrelevant. You are.” She rose from the floor and sat back up on the stool. “Tell me, do you think you’re the first high-ranking Dove I’ve strapped to a chair?” She put the nail gun to his third knuckle on his middle finger, the same side with the wet and slimy burn. “Believe me, you’re hardly the strongest I’ve laid low, and by no means whatsoever are you the smartest.” With a nasty  _ crunch!  _ she pulled the trigger.

His finger was nailed to the armrest. Like he thought, they were thick, long nails, the circumference taking over more than half the width of his finger. Just a little trickle of blood escaped the plugged-up wound. The skin turned swollen and bruised. Such a small bone had to have been destroyed by such a big nail. The pressure was more than all the drilled holes in his chest combined. 

“If you know all my tricks, then why have you been talking to me this whole time?” She did call him, though the memory was foggy, obvious, when he was doing the same thing in Taito. “You sure you’re that good at telling what I’m up to?”

“Why should I worry anymore, whether you stall me or not?” she answered. Another nail and another crushed bone at his second knuckle. “The only reason you’re not on ice until I need you is I have too much time on my hands.” Then the first. “And I do need you. Alive.” She stopped and set the nail gun in her lap. “So if you think you’re buying time with your inane questions…” Time would never be in his corner. 

At that, she stopped talking. The nail gun pressed right to the top of his second-degree burn. On contact, his hand felt tingly all over. Like when Mr. Shinohara had him sit on his hands to keep from hitting or scratching, and it took an hour or so before he finally calmed down enough that he let him take his hands back out.

Ishida pulled the trigger and for a split second, it felt exactly like when he got the questionable idea to probe a picked-open blister with a needle and accidentally poked the slimy under layer of unprotected skin. It sent a cringing feel through his entire body, radiating from his hand like a chill. If he looked, he could see the reservoir of yellowish-clear fluid building up in the raised skin around the nail. It became streaked with blood as he tried, like he did when he had to sit on his hands and got the tingly feeling, to move it. She nailed up his hand and stopped, like she stopped at the tarsals on his foot, at the carpals of his hand, sticking a crunching, trickling nail right into his wrist. 

“I’m impressed. Well, actually, I’m not sure whether to be impressed or to conclude that something is, on a neurological level, wrong with you.” She sighed as she ran her eyes up his scar-plastered torso. “Let me think…”

Ishida pressed the tip of the nail gun first to a baggy space in his underwear, readjusting when it knocked on the wood of the chair. The second time, she pressed it like she was going to smash the rest of him, to his privates. One nail. Two nails. 

“Nothing?” She stopped to set the gun back down. Her look went neutral and staring again. “What if I stopped talking?” she asked after a few seconds of silence. “Or if I turned the lights back off?” She crossed her arms, looking at him with the same face she had when she was kicking him around the factory complex. “I was listening for the vent to wake you up,” she explained. “You had me wondering if I put you in a coma until I heard you hum. Well, I believe it became full-out singing, the longer I left you alone.” 

“Bullshit,” Suzuya easily dismissed. “You had the TV on.” Loud enough to drown him out, for sure. “I could hear it from down here. How could  _ you _ hear  _ me _ ?”

“We don’t have a television.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Were you hearing things, Special Class?” Only a moment’s pause and she got up from her stool. “Very interesting,” she mused. “There might be a way under your skin, after all.” 

Almost as weird and ‘things moving around in places he didn’t know he could feel things moving around’ as putting them in, Ishida took a pneumatic nail puller and vacuumed every last one out of his extremities. Blood dripped from the neatly aligned holes, down the wood of his seat, into little glistening puddles on the black plastic. 

Once it was just the straps holding him to his seat, she unstrapped him and dragged him by his hair across the floor. Before they got to their destination, he reached his hands up, pulled hers closer, and bit her. Metacarpal bone crunched between his teeth, a mouthful of blood trickling onto his tongue, and she dropped him. He spit out two of her fingers and the piece of hand attaching them to each other, then darted like a small spider to her cart.

He still had no idea where any of his weapons were, and he sure as hell wouldn’t have the time to find out if he left her alive. Even regular old steel could kill a ghoul if he mulched them bad enough in a short enough amount of time. And there were better places to hit that others. Like he said, brain tissue took a long time to regenerate. 

But her kagune was too fast even for him. Almost as quick as he fought his way out of her grasp, the all too familiar slithering bikaku wrapped around his ankle and made an inescapable vise. “Nice try.” She held him upside down, his eyes to hers. “It’s starting to come together, where little Tooru learned to bite back.”

Still dangling him, she took a syringe, like she had been prepared to use it, from the lapel pocket of her scrubs and stuck the needle into his forearm. With that, she put him down on the floor, but not without coiling her kagune further around him, all the way to his shoulders like a full-body brace. Given its length and the small area of space they were in, she had no problem leaving him like that and working while she waited for things to get fuzzy. 

In the time it took for whatever she shot him with to start taking effect, she dragged out what looked like a big, black, oblong wooden box. Like a casket. She laid him down on it like a body on a slab, still restraining him with her kagune while she cleaned and dressed his nail gun wounds. 

He didn’t fall asleep that time, like he must have done in the factory complex. His eyes stayed open, his senses… not sharp, but there. He was awake, but when she let him go and he tried to get up, he was freefalling. Physically, in his head and chest and everything else, he got the same sensation he did when a car ran a red light and Abara had to floor the brakes not to hit it, only the feeling stayed much longer than it did in a car. His sense of where he was, not just the location that he hadn’t figured out anyhow, but where his body was in the space he occupied-- the meaning of up, down, one side, the other, or where his arm would go if he moved it, faded and faded until, before he knew it, he had no idea. 

He was awake, but he was still. Almost like a ragdoll as Ishida left him and came back with something white. He couldn’t tell what it was until she sat him up; he held himself up and stayed seated, catatonic, and laid the shoulders of it on his shoulders. She fed his arms through the sleeves and by the time she fastened the back, he knew. She put him in a straitjacket.

Then she took him by the back of the straitjacket and dragged him off the top of the box. When she opened the lid, the inside was as pitch black as the outside. That was the last thing Suzuya saw. The black inside of the box. For then she picked up another black thing, a strip of cloth, and wrapped it around his face. “Let’s see you escape this,” she said before grabbing him again and throwing him in what had to be the box. The lid closed. Footsteps echoed off the floor, fading and changing timbre as she stepped up the stairs, and the very last thing he heard was the  _ click!  _ of a shutting door. His world went not only still and black, but quiet.

How long he was suspended in the still, black, and quiet world, he had no idea. He learned the hard way that he could still move his leg. He gave it a try and kicked the lid to the box, sending a concussive  _ boom! _ through his entire skull. He stiffened, his ears feeling like they were about to explode and leak blood, at the noise. 

His skin crawled like there was an entire colony of little ants scuttling between the layers. Invisible bees started to buzz inside his bones and butterfly wings fluttered in his head, caterpillars writhing in his organs. His body was full of bugs, consuming him more and more from the inside, the longer he couldn’t move or see or hear. He needed relief. He needed the bugs to go away. He needed it so bad he could feel in his throat that he was screaming. So bad he thrashed and his head hit a wall of the box. So bad that when he hit his head, he hit it again. So bad he couldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ishida azusa on the outside: you intrigue me sc suzuya, i love a challenge, etc etc  
> on the inside: internally crying ‘please take him back’ to the suzuya squad


	12. Traces

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me? updating my fic at 2am with minimal proofreading and an improvised chapter title? it's more likely than you think. honesltly though deal with the wait b/w updates or i'll happily rip your heart out through your kneecaps.

Mizurou and Nakarai were the first to lose their ghoul, vaguely familiar under their mask and relentless with a far-reaching rinkaku. They couldn’t hold a candle to their cunning mistress, but the ghoul did have tricks of their own, easily making as many scales as needed to throw them in different directions, forcing them further and further apart until, before the two knew it, they had no idea where the other was. It took Left down the ghoul’s middle and Right popping off their head to find each other. Just as they got the chance to read the first four texts, the fifth came in. 

Even first, they were met with two bodies in the complex and only one warm. When Abara and Mikage too responded to the texts and joined them, they were waiting on medical help and Mizurou was trying to make Mutsuki cough up some of the blood he had been left to breathe, lying face-down, just like the photo attached to the fifth text, in a pool of it. The only thing left of Suzuya, apart from a few puddles that matched the blood sample on file for him, were the plastic, titanium, and quinque steel fragments of his prosthetic. They lost him and Ishida, as well as the three-or-more Witch clones they didn’t get around to engaging before Mutsuki sent for backup.

Pieces of Victim Number 8 lay on the medical examiner’s table, pending identification beside the total of two ghouls who fought to the death to keep the squad apart for as long as inhumanly possible. Blood samples from the floor and walls were a mix of types and RC counts, not enough spatter to suggest anyone had been dismembered for transport. When Mutsuki was healed enough to have blood drawn without going faint, his tox screen came out clean. So the emptied syringe and used needle they found on the complex floor hadn’t been used on him. The medical-quality ketamine identified with a swab of the barrel was hard to get one’s hands on unless ‘one’ was a hospital. They held out hope that Ishida wouldn’t use it to sedate a dead man, that the syringe and the blood meant Suzuya was still alive. After all, that fifth text, presumably sent by Ishida from Mutsuki’s phone, Mutsuki lying unconscious in the attached photo, read:

"Patch him up for me. This isn’t over."

She could have killed Mutsuki and she didn’t. She had already left one of theirs alive. As cursed as a woman in her trade could make living for her victim, they had to hope Suzuya too would be spared long enough for them to get a step ahead of her. But it was a matter of ‘long enough.’ That was a reality any investigator with a shred of realism in their mind had to face. 

Nakarai delegated tasks in Suzuya’s place, him and Mizurou had gone to the medical examiner for a full report on the three bodies. Abara seemed in on something that the rest of the squad wasn’t, since Suzuya split them up in Taito, so Nakarai had him working backwards and combing the previous displays for potential hints that they might have missed when they didn’t have as much of the full picture. Mikage was following up with the art school staff to see if anyone had anything of use. Mutsuki organized papers.

In some hidden corner of his mind, it felt almost good to be --as Mutsuki saw it-- punished. Like he could fix everything by sorting scattered notes between a divided binder and the whiteboard. Like when his penance was up, the world would right itself and it would all be okay again. For the most part, though, he couldn’t stop thinking about how much worse he deserved. 

Suzuya was always the reason he didn’t have to face his fears alone. He was his reassurance that if he fell, someone would catch him. Yet when he could have --should have-- done the same… he failed him. Even then, the factory complex was a blur of black, white, grey, and red. But when he was engaged or at least competent on the battlefield, the battle was never a blur. He knew he froze. He remembered the gripping sense of paralysis when everything suddenly started to happen too fast for him to stand a chance at keeping up. One second, Suzuya was grabbing him. Another, he was alone and something sounded like thunder in the distance. Suzuya's voice rang in his ears. Steel hit kagune. Bodies hit concrete. He tasted his own blood at some point and beyond that, the only things he had to draw from were his teammates' text messages, what his regenerated wounds were consistent with, and the awareness that the rest was a blur. Awareness that he let what happened in the complex happen, that it should have been him missing in action instead of Suzuya. He knew it was his fault. And he knew it should have been him.

It only made things that much worse that he was the one sorting through everything the squad had on the case so far. He leafed through every crime scene photo and medical examiner’s report, looked up close at what Suzuya’s captor could do to people. He reread the background from the old Witch file and had to wonder if Suzuya too had been wiped from the face of the Earth and they just didn’t know it yet. The last meaningful thing he said to him was ‘get out.’ The last thing he did with him was avoid him. Even if he wasn’t in the hands of a ghoul like Ishida, in danger but not that level of danger, that was a thought he couldn’t handle without the threat of tears. 

“Are you okay, Rank I?” Abara came up behind him, towering over him where he knelt on the floor, surrounded by legal pads, folders, and loose papers. If Nakarai’s punishment-slash-assignment made Mutsuki feel better, the second worst part of a post-Taito conference room was how nice Abara, of all people, took it upon himself to be to him. He remembered his look before they split up. He remembered him interrupting Suzuya when he paired up with him. Abara didn’t trust him. Now he was vindicated, every right to want him dead, not to mention barely keeping it together himself, and he checked on him every day. Like he was the victim and not just as instrumental in Suzuya's disappearance as Ishida herself.

“I’m fine,” he said, unable to bring his eyes up from the small pile he was working on at the moment and look Abara in the face. “Worried about Suzuya.” Just as everyone was. No need to try and make him feel better about being the reason his beloved leader could be nothing but a memory. If Abara could just forget he existed like Nakarai did, that would be great. They both knew his job was an extra task their deputy leader would sooner bullshit into existence than give Suzuya’s potential killer a role in the investigation.

“Nakarai has me looking at the same scenes as you. He won’t be back from the M.E. for at least an hour.” Considering what he was doing then was busy work, “maybe we could work together. If it would help.” That was Abara’s thing, now. Any chance he could find, he tried to get Mutsuki to work with him. Maybe it was to keep an eye on him. Friends close, enemies closer. Something like that. Mutsuki didn’t know and, despite the fleeting impulse to ask, he didn’t want to know. But last time, he said ‘no’ and the squad didn’t get any closer to finding Ishida that day. That time, he nodded and Abara took a seat against the wall beside him, putting down his folders and taking out the photos from the same scene Mutsuki was compiling into a section of a binder. Sumida. The missing wife and dismembered husband. “You’ve been at that one for a while,” said Abara. “Something personal?”

“No.” Yes. The closer Mutsuki looked at him, the husband even had the sunless skin and gangling figure that haunted every time he bathed, every change of clothes, every white flower he so much as saw a picture of. But even if he did have something personal slowing him down, it was nothing personal that would help Suzuya. Nothing worth reliving to Abara unless someone’s life depended on it. And it didn’t. It couldn’t. Torso held him in seclusion. Like the shower he found the body from Sumida in, the cave was a private place. How could an event be relevant to an unrelated case if he was the only living thing who knew about it?

“Are you sure about that?” Abara asked with knit eyebrows. It was like this every day. He didn’t relent. One day post-Taito, Mutsuki gave him an answer he didn’t want four times before he stopped asking. Two, he did the same, but not without guilt setting in as soon as Abara gave up. Three… it couldn’t be relevant. It couldn’t be. Could it?

“He looks like someone I know,” was an answer, but he couldn’t will himself to do any better than that. “No one who will help us find Suzuya. They died on Rushima.” 

“I can see it’s bothering you, though.” Abara put a hand on Mutsuki’s shoulder and Mutsuki went tense. He picked his head up from the papers in surprise and Abara met his wide gaze with a sympathetic look. “Do you want to talk about it?” Abara was practically Suzuya’s part-time carer, but that side of him spilled over onto the rest of the squad. Not to the degree that he did Suzuya, but to a degree, he den-mothered whoever didn’t push him away too hard, almost like Sasaki in that respect. 

“Thank you, but no.” Mutsuki shrugged Abara’s hand off and returned to his binder, slipping each page of photos into its own page protector and feeding the rings through. “I know Nakarai is benching me on purpose.” He didn’t blame him. “But I have to ask. Are we getting any closer to finding him?”

“We might be.” Abara flashed him a small smile. Forced, Mutsuki knew it had to be. Begrudging. Keeping back what everyone in the conference room had to be thinking. “Here. Let me fill you in.” He opened up the rest of his folder. “Maybe you can tell me what you think?” 

“Okay.” After a beat of silence, Mutsuki nodded. Even if Abara was just offering him the illusion of doing something that would actually help, he would take the illusion over the crushing self-awareness that putting printouts in plastic sleeves wasn’t getting anyone home alive. 

Every murder weapon they knew of was a weapon, as opposed to a kagune, and though some blood samples from CSI were mixed-type and mixed-DNA, not a single one was mixed-species. They were back on Black Cat’s trail, and they knew they were looking for a human. Through a series of if-you-cooperate-you-walk type deals that --depending on whether they were interpreted the Sasaki way or the Mado way-- might have bent Ghoul Countermeasures Law a little bit, the squad managed to eliminate two of Suzuya’s Black Cats through blood work, and another through an airtight and well-corroborated alibi.

“She didn’t fit our behavioral profile, anyway,” Abara said about the third. Not even what little they had of it. They kept her background and contact information handy, in case it really couldn’t be anyone else and they had to have missed something, but for the time being, they had four total suspects cleared from the list of six. From what the analysts dug up on them, one other suspect looked good as Black Cat up until the rest of their background loaded and the squad found out they had been identified at the morgue and declared dead, presumably caught up in human organized crime, a year before the break. 

“That’s great,” said Mutsuki. “And the other two?”

“We haven’t been able to get in contact with them yet.” But they were working on it. Abara assured Mutsuki of that. They were just going to take more detective work than the first four. 

“You still think Black Cat is our best lead?” 

“For now.” Ishida herself was the mastermind. The only traces of her they had found since her lanyard were the empty syringe, her blood on the factory complex floor, and residue from her kagune on the pieces of Suzuya’s prosthetic in Taito. It was evidence of her involvement in the new kills, but it wasn’t anything that would track her down, in and of itself. “Why? Do you have another idea?” 

Abara sounded too hopeful for Mutsuki’s comfort. Were they more desperate than he let on? Was he just saying what he said about the narrowed suspect list and his optimism about the search to make him feel better? Mutsuki was going to be sick, running through the possibilities. 

“No, no.” Though he wondered, now, if he should come up with one. “I just…” But he couldn’t think of anything helpful. “I don’t know why I asked that. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sure? A new angle can’t hurt.” 

“I’m sure.” Though as soon as Abara let him, he would do his best to change that. “Thank you for keeping me caught up.” Would that he could have repaid the favor. Would that it had helped him help Suzuya.

“Well, if you think of anything…” Abara started to pick his things back up from the floor. “I really think Nakarai is just worried about you.” In other words, he wasn’t being quarantined. Abara wanted him to come forward and say something. Mutsuki could tell that much, but he had no idea what 'something' was supposed to be. He still didn’t have Abara figured out when Nakarai and Mizurou came back from the medical examiner, nor did he have anything more to tell him when their deputy leader called a squad meeting for which even he was summoned to a seat at the conference room table. 


End file.
